ESKOM is confident it will meet its deadline of November next year to recode more than 6.8 million of its electricity meters to establishments as the current prepaid meter software expires.
General Manager for Operations enablement Velaphi Ntuli told a media briefing yesterday that any meter that had not been coded by the deadline would not upload prepaid tokens, which would leave customers without electricity supply.
Making matters more complicated, Eskom and municipalities lose about R25 billion in revenue every year due to electricity metre tampering.
Eskom's technicians have also been attacked in parts of Soweto as they try to install split metres in communities suspected of connecting to the grid illegally.
The announcement yesterday follows on a programme Eskom started last year to recode and rollout the current metre system, which has been susceptible to tampering and by passing from supply poles.
Eskom said households that had illegal connections would not be able to make the switchover as purchases were monitored and that the system was designed to cut out ghost vendors.
The Key Revision Number (KRN) or the Token Identifier (TID) Rollover Programme is a prepaid electricity metering industry is undertaking to ensure that all prepaid meters that will roll over to a new Token Identifier Code on November 24, 2024 are correctly re-coded.
Ntuli said Eskom hoped to finish the rollout three months before the deadline to allow the entity space to sort out possible issues and glitches in time.
He confirmed that the utility had more than 6.8 million meters that require recoding to ensure they function properly after the deadline and that this not only affects Eskom, but all prepaid meters complying with STS Standard Transfer Specification(STS).
“We at Eskom started working on this quite a while back. We've been updating and upgrading our back-end system to be able to handle this. So there's a lot of preparation that has been going on in the background to make sure that when we get to this point of roll over, we are ready to do that,” Ntuli said, adding that Eskom had embarked on a soft rollout in August this year, which saw 672000 Eskom-controlled meters updated over a two-month period.
Eskom set a target of 30 000 meters per province between August and September and that it achieved this.
He said Eskom was offering a do-it-yourself approach that would allow customers to make the switch themselves through getting a token to put in their meter.
Senior manager for the centre of excellence in retail, Dade Mbhele, said the project was moving on from phase one, which focused mainly on dealing with glitches and constraints in the project, to phase two, which is currently under way.
“Our strategy for this phase is to target the bigger township codes, where we have a lot of customers sitting in one Supply Group Code (SGC) supply group code.
“ When we're about to change areas, we will notify customers through local media that we are ready for them to be able to do the recoding of the meters,” Mbhele said.
The last phase of the project will see the utility focus on customers that have not made the switch within the first two phases.
BUSINESS REPORT