“It’s an absolute loss to run a shift from midnight to 5am. There is nothing happening. That is what dealers are up in arms about. They [oil companies] aren’t giving us the option to close between those hours,” said Kharbai.He added that discussions with the oil companies about sites remaining open 24/7 are ongoing.
“Dealers are prepared to make the capital investment in a solar solution but the oil companies are reluctant [to let them] because they don’t own the property … the asset belongs to the oil companies.” “On diesel, the loss was as high as R2.81 per litre and December was the month when we really started feeling the impact of the load shedding and the generator costs to keep the sites running were R30 000 to R90 000 for the month.