Prepaid electricity meter warning

Eskom has pre-coded roughly 6.6 million of the 6.9 million prepaid meters that must be updated before 24 November 2024, but these customers must complete the rest of the work to ensure they can load units after the deadline.

Of some concern is that only approximately 4.06 million customers have recoded their prepaid meter, and the update rate is slowing.

The update is necessary because all Standard Transfer Specifications (STS) compliant prepaid electricity meters worldwide will stop accepting voucher tokens unless they receive a Key Revision Number (KRN) code.

An anti-fraud system built into STS-compliant prepaid systems — effectively a timer that started counting down from 1 January 1993 — is behind the need to upgrade the meters.

Each prepaid electricity token comes with a unique token identifier (TID) within its 20-digit code, and the TID system will run out of combinations of these codes on 24 November.

Across Eskom Direct and municipal customers, there are roughly 11.64 million prepaid meters in South Africa that are susceptible to the bug.

Deputy electricity minister Samantha Graham says customers with pre-coded meters must now recode them.

If they fail to do so, their meters will no longer accept prepaid electricity tokens, so customers will be unable to buy new electricity.

“What needs to happen now is that users of the prepaid meters need to go and buy their prepaid electricity, and they will be provided with a series of digits that they can then input into their meters,” said Graham.

“That will allow those meters to roll over into the new cycle,” she added.

Pre-coding is an internal procedure where Eskom prepares meters for issuing recoding tokens.

Eskom said its main recoding project in all the nine provinces started after a successful pilot in Gauteng.

“Since then, a rapid approach of ensuring that customers are empowered with the necessary information and supporting channels to do it themselves was adopted,” said Eskom.

Eskom and the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) have online dashboards to show the latest progress of their KRN rollover projects.

MyBroadband consulted these dashboards to determine whether the projects are progressing and whether they are on track to be completed by 24 November 2024.

By 12 August 2024, just after Eskom had announced the pre-coding, the Eskom KRN rollover dashboard showed that only 4,019,465 customers had applied their updates, leaving roughly 2.88 million to upgrade.

As of 27 August 2024, the dashboard showed that 4,058,910 customers had updated their meters, representing a rate of approximately 2,630 meters per day.

The rate has markedly slowed from around 14,670 per day in early July 2024.

For all of the power utility’s customers to be rolled over by the cutoff, roughly 31,921 Eskom Direct customers must recode their prepaid meters daily up to 24 November 2024.

If Eskom’s update rate does not accelerate, it could also suggest that many of the remaining customers are using illegal electricity tokens or have bypassed their meters.

Eskom’s head of distribution, Mondle Bala, has explained customers who have had their meters recoded and attempt to load electricity units purchased from an illegal or “ghost” vendor would not be able to recode them or load additional tokens.

These vendors use stolen or lost point-of-sale machines to sell electricity tokens, often at a discount over Eskom’s rates.

The tokens function just like legal tokens but Eskom has claimed they will stop working from 24 November 2024.

According to the SALGA online dashboard, an additional 109,195 meters were updated across the country’s municipalities between 13 August and 27 August 2024.

In addition, 40,802 meters were removed from the total number to be reset, potentially due to ongoing auditing of the actual number of meters.

As of 27 August 2024, there were roughly 1.05 million meters still updated across all municipalities.

To reach the target on time, 11,884 of these remaining meters would need to be updated every day up to 24 November 2024.