Eskom cracks whip on prepaid electricity — but disaster still looms

Eskom’s recent announcement that it pre-coded the vast majority of its prepaid electricity meters could not only help the power utility speedily update many more meters but is also a warning to illegal electricity buyers.

Eskom and South African municipalities are in a race against time to ensure they update a combined 11.53 million prepaid meters before 24 November 2024.

On that date, all Standard Transfer Specifications-complaint prepaid meters in the world that are not recoded with two key revision numbers (KRNs) will no longer accept tokens.

That is due to a timer-linked security mechanism in the 20 digits of electricity tokens that prevents their reuse. For prepaid meters that haven’t received their KRNs, the timer is set to run out of range on 24 November 2024.

The KRN rollover projects run by Eskom and municipalities require customers to manually enter two recoding tokens in their customer interface unit when it is their turn to update their meter.

These codes are provided with electricity purchases from legitimate vendors.

When MyBroadband previously assessed Eskom’s KRN rollover progress on 7 July 2024, only 3.86 million of the utility’s 6.9 million prepaid meters had been recoded with the do-it-yourself (DIY) process.

We calculated that the utility would have to increase its daily update rate from 14,670 to over 20,000 if it wanted to avoid any prepaid meters becoming dysfunctional by the deadline.

In a statement on 30 July 2024, Eskom announced it successfully “pre-coded” 6.6 million of its 6.9 million prepaid meters via its central systems.

The power utility explained that pre-coding was an internal procedure where it prepared meters for the issuing of recoding tokens.

For the meter to remain functional after 24 November 2024, customers will still need to recode the meter with the two KRN codes.

The only real change that the pre-coding seems to cause is that it makes it impossible for people to load electricity bought from illegal or “ghost” vendors on their meters.

These criminals sell electricity tokes from stolen point-of-sale machines, typically legacy standalone or offline terminals.

According to Eskom distribution head Mondle Bala, customers with pre-coded meters who attempt to load electricity bought from illegal vendors will not be able to recode them or load additional illegal tokens.

Rollover rate slowed down further

As of 1 August 2024, the Eskom KRN rollover dashboard showed that only about 4.01 million customers had applied their updates. Roughly 2.89 million meters remained un-updated.

Since our last assessment, Eskom’s daily rollover rate has also been slashed by more than half, dropping from 14,670 to 6,496. Eskom will need this to improve to 25,340 meters per day, a substantial increase.

However, updated meters will likely climb substantially as people start buying electricity in August, the first month after Eskom implemented the pre-coding.

2.63 million more customers will first need to enter their KRN rollover codes before they can load electricity tokens.

If the number does not pick up, it could suggest that a substantial number of the remaining customers are using illegal electricity tokens or are bypassing their meters illegally.

While some might have bought electricity in bulk and won’t need to load more tokens in the near future, it generally makes more financial sense to buy tokens in small batches due to the incline block tariff structure.

The municipal rollover’s progress — available on the South African Local Government Association’s portal — showed that roughly 1.25 million meters of municipal electricity customers still needed to get the update.

With the daily rollover rate at 4,999 in the past month, over 678,300 meters could be left with dysfunctional meters from 24 November 2024.

The table below shows the progress on Eskom and municipal KRN rollovers and estimates how many meters could remain un-updated by the deadline.

	Eskom	Municipalities
Completed	4,011,148	3,347,860
Current daily rollover rate (from 8 July to 1 August 2024)	6,496	4,999
Meters outstanding	2,888,712	1,249,304
Estimated additional KRN rollovers by 24 November 2024 based on current rates	740,544	569,886
Estimated total KRN rollover	4,751,692	3,917,746
Estimated prepaid meters outstanding by deadline	2,148,168	678,364

Eskom KRN rollover progress dashboard — Updated 1 August 2024

Municipal KRN rollover progress dashboard — Updated 1 August 2024