Also read the following articles on how you can use less electricity:

• Cutting bills made easy (The EFergy e2 makes reducing your energy bill as simple as pressing a few buttons...)

   

• Slaying energy vampires (We identify your home's energy vampires and how you can save expensive electricity...)

   

• Bright as a button (Learn how you can stay bright without gobbling up more precious electricity than necessary.)

   

• Keep it fresh for less (If spiralling electricity costs make you hot under the collar, follow these tips to use less electricity when refrigerating.)

   

• Heat water, not the sky! (Water heating accounts for 40 percent of household energy use. Here's how you can save...)

   

• Efficiency myths, busted! (Kabous le Roux debunks 20 patently wrong, yet widely held electricity saving myths...)

   

• Stay warm for less (How to save electricity (i.e. money!) when warming up this winter...)

After Eskom takes its whack of the next electricity tariff hike, municipalities take yet another bite?

One of the more worrying aspects about our stratospheric domestic electricity costs is the compounding effect of municipal distribution. Those few urban communities still supplied directly by Eskom can thank their lucky stars that they are still being supplied by the country?s source generator ? if the word "thank" can ever again be used when referring to Eskom.

Municipalities make a tidy profit in selling electrical power to their communities. But the power they buy in bulk from Eskom is also used in most cases to run their own buildings, street lights, traffic signals and underground pump systems ? for which they themselves don?t pay and which consumers thought they were funding through their household rates.

The so-called "hidden" charges pump up the end-users' costs and are a subject of considerable anger.

For example, there is a service charge and there is VAT at 14 percent. Then there is VAT on the service charge. My own experience in Cape Town, where I live, is that this service charge varies when I buy electricity for my meter and yet the council says that the service fee is a daily fee and works out to be the same whether your buy once a week, once a month or once a year (by the way, once you?ve got a prepaid meter you?re not allowed to go back to getting a bill). And why VAT at all on what is simply a fuel? There?s no VAT on petrol or diesel.

In Cape Town, journalist Tony Robinson has made a study of the mega municipality?s somewhat convoluted distribution system which has different levels of charging such as high and low domestic tariffs. Local community newspaper The Tatler has published some of Robinson?s allegations which include this quote:

"Of a domestic low consumption tariff of 77.37 cents a unit, the city pays Eskom just under 35 cents a unit. So there is a mark-up of more than 100 percent."

Cape Town municipality has published figures for service increases which take effect from July. These include average increases of 24.6 percent for electricity, 10 percent for water and sanitation and 18 percent for refuse collection. In doing so, the city pointed out that the jump in electricity was inevitable because of the 28.9 percent Eskom tariff increase imposed on local government and confirmed by the National Regulator.

In 2008 Eskom increased charges by 28 percent; Cape Town municipality raised theirs by 35 percent. Last year Eskom got 28 percent, but the city took 35 percent. Read about it on page two...