S.Africa: Prepaid electricity meter disaster looms – 2 million meters will become useless suddenly

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Over two million prepaid electricity meters will likely become useless in less than two months unless Eskom drastically speeds up a critical software update project.

However, many of the users of these meters might currently be stealing electricity through illegal bypassing, which means they might not be impacted — at least not until Eskom or municipalities come knocking.

Eskom still needs to update about 2.9 million of its customers’ prepaid meters as part of the key revision number (KRN) rollover, while municipalities have around 600,000 outstanding.

From 24 November 2024, all the world’s Standard Transfer Specifications–compliant prepaid meters that do not get this update will stop being able to accept new electricity tokens.

The issue is caused by a date-linked security mechanism that counts every minute since 1 January 1993 and will run out of range next month.

Eskom and municipalities require that their customers manually update their meters by entering two codes that will update the key revision number.

This resets the base date to 1 January 2014, and meters will only run out of range again in 2045.

According to the South African Local Government Association (SALGA), about 86% of the roughly 4.25 million prepaid meters across the country’s municipalities had been updated by Tuesday, 1 October 2024.

Although some municipalities started their KRN rollovers several years ago, many only began their projects in the past year.

With 3.61 million municipal meters already updated, about 599,645 are left to recode in the next two months.

To update all of them before the 24 November deadline, municipalities would have to update about 11,105 per day.

In the past two weeks, the prepaid meters pending updates declined by roughly 5,824 per day.

At that rate, about 285,000 municipal meters will remain un-updated and will no longer be able to load electricity tokens.

The screenshot of the SALGA dashboard below shows the KRN rollover progress in municipalities.

Eskom’s situation far worse
Serious though it may be, the municipal update rate is well above Eskom’s.

Eskom’s KRN rollover started in August 2023, but in the 14 months since, it has updated less than 60% of the 6.9 million prepaid meters on its database.

As of 1 October 2024, the power utility had only updated 4.14 million meters, with another 2.87 million outstanding.

To update all meters, Eskom would have to increase its daily update rate of less than 5,000 meters from the past two weeks to over 50,000 per day for the next two months.

The vast majority of these meters had already been precoded by Eskom by late July 2024, which means they should have been getting their recode tokens during the past two months.

The dashboard screenshot below shows Eskom’s KRN rollover progress, as of 1 October 2024.

Massive electricity theft

Considering how incline block tariffs discourage bulk electricity purchases, it is unlikely that the slow updates are merely due to people choosing not to load electricity.

One possibility is that many of the meters are no longer in use — but it would be strange for Eskom to keep them on its books after such a long period.

The more likely scenario is that many of these users have bypassed their meters illegally or are buying illegal electricity tokens from so-called “ghost” vendors using stolen token issuing machines.

The former would not require buying any additional electricity, while the latter would not generate the two KRN rollover codes.

Both would result in meters not getting updated.

Even if just half the outstanding prepaid meters are guilty of one of these practices, Eskom could be losing much more money than it has previously estimated.

Eskom recently told SABC News it was fining illegally connected customers around R6,050 and disconnecting them until they paid the fee.

Eskom spokesperson Daphne Mokwena said the utility had found that 90% of customers in certain areas targeted for investigation in recent weeks were illegally connected.

If even half the outstanding 2.87 million meters are being used by people with illegal connections or illegal tokens, Eskom could be issuing a combined R8.7 billion in fines.

However, if that number of people were effectively stealing electricity for a year or longer, they would have cost Eskom substantially more in lost revenue.

The table below shows estimates of how much revenue Eskom could be losing in a year, with various assumptions about the number of illegally connected customers on its network.

Source: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/563194-prepaid-electricity-meter-disaster-looms.html

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