Eskom is kicking its project to recode the 6.8-million prepaid electricity meters in its distribution network into high gear, with the deadline to switch to the new system now just more than one year away.
The recoding initiative will apply to all prepaid electricity customers, whether served directly by Eskom or by a municipality. Prepaid meters will not have to be replaced, customers will just have to perform a simple recoding on their existing meters.
Some of the pilot projects it has been running for the countrywide recoding initiative have shown an increase in revenue in those areas switched to a new series of electricity vending codes.
The most likely explanation, says Eskom, is that meters that have rolled over to a new token identifier code will no longer accept codes issued by “ghost vendors” — fraudulent electricity sellers that sell prepaid electricity tokens at a fraction of the usual price.
The rollover, said Velaphi Ntuli, Eskom GM for distribution operations and enablement, “will ensure revenue protection, and the new system will eradicate [the use of] ghost vendors”.
Eskom senior manager of distribution customer services Portia Papu said that in communities such as Riverside in Johannesburg, where about 5,800 meters have already been recoded, they saw a positive effect on revenue.
“When we started with the pilot sales went up in the areas where prepaid meters had been converted. The community was unhappy [because] they could not use tokens purchased from ghost vendors,” Papu said.
Eskom will get a much clearer idea of the effect ghost vendors have had on its revenue through this recoding initiative. In a submission to parliament earlier in 2023, former CEO Andre de Ruyter said the theft and fraud of prepaid electricity vouchers was estimated to amount to billions of rand per year. He said the total loss due to prepaid voucher fraud could exceed R5bn per year, or R400m per month.
The prepaid meter recoding initiative is necessary because the current terminal identification code on Eskom and municipal prepaid electricity meter will expire on November 24 2024. After this date all standard transfer specification-compliant meters will stop accepting credit tokens, which will mean they will stop dispensing electricity after the existing credit is used up, thus making the meter inactive, said Ntuli who briefed the media on Thursday.
“If your meter has not been recoded, it will not accept the tokens you have purchased, which means it will stop working. All prepaid meters must be recoded, whether you are an Eskom customer or a municipally supplied customer,” according to Eskom.
Customers will have to do the recoding themselves using two key change tokens they will receive with their normal credit token purchases from approved vendors.
But, said Ntuli, Eskom will provide support channels to explain the easy, step-by-step process for the simple recode process.
“If a customer is struggling, they can log a fault and if we can’t help them telephonically, we will dispatch a technician to help them,” he said.
During the pilot phase from August to September more than 600,000 meters were successfully recoded.
Ntuli said they hoped to have all 6.8-million prepaid meters recoded three months before the November 2024 deadline.
Brian Mokgele, Eskom’s national prepayment value chain manager, said prepaid meters in municipal distribution areas would also have to be recoded. Some municipalities have already started, he said.
According to a SA Local Government Association (Salga) dashboard, there were about 4.5-million prepaid meters in municipal distribution networks and about 1.7-million (about 40%) of these have already been recoded.
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