Eskom must bypass municipalities

[Kevin Lancaster]

Eskom must bypass municipalities

Going the route of prepaid power for both corporates and households in South Africa could do wonders for Eskom’s balance sheet.

 

[system32]

Perhaps Eskom can start by going direct in Soweto and collecting the R4b due...

Oh wait, they are direct in Soweto.

 

[biena]

lmao, so Eskom are you going to pay the municipality for the cables/transformers. Are you now going to take over the maintenance in the municipality.
No. thought so.

 

[gertgous]

Unfortunately, in practise, most people not paying currently already does have prepaid meters. Prepaid meters are easy to bypass, the bypass of the meters even sometimes offered by installer. Removes the customer from the supplier focus since it is assumed the customer will pay, so they try and compensate by working on statistics but that does not work either because it is based on a lot of assumptions. Prepaid is a sure way to lose more money. Eskom's own domestic clients have a much lower payment rate than the average in municipalities.

My take on the solution is to keep normal meters by pay directly into Eskom account.], ie bypass the munic. Eskom can pay a commission on funds received to the munic.

 

[LaraC]

Can’t Eskom or the municipality offer discounts if your account is paid in full? Wouldn’t it serve as an incentive for customers to keep their accounts up to date?

 

[bekdik]

And then watch Cape Town have all kinds of problems!

 

[f2wohf]

The difficulty to bypass the municipality is that they have a constitutional right over their precinct, and that this right is also a big of revenues for some of them.

 

[Drifter]

Can’t Eskom or the municipality offer discounts if your account is paid in full? Wouldn’t it serve as an incentive for customers to keep their accounts up to date?

That already happens, IMHO, they must get a task force together with SAPS/SANDF and go into townships and remove all illegal connections, few 1000 MW right there.