Two down, others ongoing: municipals give progress on prepaid meter upgrades

The countdown is under way for prepaid electricity customers to ensure their meters are recorded in the key revision number rollover project

With the countdown officially under way for prepaid electricity customers to ensure their meters are recorded in the key revision number rollover project, the country’s biggest metros have provided an update on the progress made in their rollout of the scheme.

Eskom on Tuesday urged all prepaid electricity customers to update their meters immediately to avoid a power loss as the November 24 deadline looms.

The power utility has reiterated meters using key revision number 1 (KRN1) will no longer accept electricity tokens after Sunday.

This means once the current credit is depleted, customers will lose power and the meter will become inoperable, necessitating a meter replacement that could cost customers up to R12,000.

The City of Cape Town said its prepaid customers are not affected by the looming deadline as all 570,000 meters have been successfully updated.

“The city's prepaid electricity meter updates have been completed way ahead of deadline and its customers are not affected by the end [of] November deadline.

“Over the past three years that the city has been managing the update process, customers would have received their token update codes and have inserted those one-off codes with their purchase,” it said in a statement issued earlier this month.

EThekwini also confirmed it had completed the rollover “on all its active purchasing meters”. The city has 450,000 customers using prepaid meters.

“During this process of rolling over the prepaid electricity token system to the new Standard Transfer Specification (STS) 2 format, the city identified non-active meters that require attention. To address this, an extensive meter sweep aimed at ensuring compliance across all meters will be initiated.

“As part of these corrective measures, any faulty meters will be replaced with a meter that is already programmed with the new TID,” the city said in October.

The power utility for the country's biggest metro, City of Johannesburg's City Power, says it is well on track to meet the Sunday deadline having achieved a 99% completion rate across its eight service delivery centre (SDCs) supply areas in Joburg.

Breaking this down, the utility said that Roodepoort, Reuven, Randburg, Lenasia, and the inner city SDCs had achieved over 99.6% compliance. Midrand now stands at 99.31%, Hursthill at 99.44% while Alexandra at 87.15%.

“Overall, we have successfully upgraded 141,630 of 142,810 prepaid meters, achieving a project completion rate of 99%. There is only about 119 partially upgraded meters that are outstanding, and we encourage those customers to use the do-it-yourself method to complete the upgrade.

“Additionally, we have deployed more technicians and resources to our SDCs and customer call centre to specifically address [token identifier] TID-related queries to ensure that no-one is left behind,” spokesperson Isaac Mangena said.

The City of Tshwane meanwhile says that while all 357,155 prepaid meters within its control “have be updated to ensure that they comply with the STS”, nearly 40% are not vending — meaning the owners haven't purchased prepaid tokens and therefore have not received the necessary tokens.

“It must be stated that 64% (240,032) prepaid meters are vending, while 36% (127,123) are not vending. This can be attributed to the fact that the owners are not about to recharge or the prepaid meter has been bridged.

“As of today, 100% of prepaid meters that require STS-2 activation have been loaded on the vending system so that customers can receive their conversion tokens [upon purchase],” spokesperson Lindela Mashigo said.

Ekurhuleni is in a similar position to Tshwane, saying that while it had completed the meter reset on all meters actively making purchases, the process to complete the recode, by the owners, was still in progress. 

“Meters not physically keychanged are those that are not buying, [of which] a provision to upgrade them is in place. The keychanges for those meters are generated and available to ensure that meters will not be affected when the consumer starts buying,” spokesperson Zweli Dlamini said.

IN TROUBLE

In the Eastern Cape, troubled Makana municipality in Makhanda is in a race against time to recode more than 5,000 Eskom meters before the weekend.

The municipality and two other local authorities were red-flagged by the power utility during a parliamentary project oversight committee meeting in early November for the delayed implementation of the rollover project.

Last week, the Dispatch reported that 6,846 Eskom customers in Makana ran the risk of not being able to load electricity after the November 24 cut-off date because the municipality had not started the project.