Our workers’ hands are clean, says Eskom

Eskom has found no evidence linking its employees to illegal electricity connections, despite claims to the contrary from community leaders and numerous social media users.

In a joint operation with law enforcement, the power utility recently confiscated 35 illegally connected transformers in just one extension of the Diepsloot township in Gauteng.

These illegal connections can destabilise distribution networks, cause frequent supply interruptions, and pose a danger to Eskom technicians working on the electricity network.

The scale of the illegal activity raised questions over the potential involvement of electrical professionals.

Community leaders in the area accused Eskom employees of being involved in selling the illegally connected transformers.

Several Twitter/X users have also accused Eskom’s employees of being involved in the illegal connections and claim to have reported them to the power utility.

“We call and tell you, your employees are connecting people illegally, but nothing is done,” one user complained.

“We do follow up so you can come to the houses, but nothing is done. End result is that everyone will be illegally connected.”

Eskom said it would investigate these allegations but recently told MyBroadband it could find no evidence that its staff were involved in illegal connections.

“Most of our employees are dedicated and hardworking, consistently delivering on their daily tasks and striving to enhance Eskom’s performance,” the power utility said.

Although Eskom could not confirm how residents in the area obtained the illegally connected transformers, it said that some community members and a councillor for the area said they bought the transformers themselves and paid private companies to install them.

“While Eskom cannot confirm any involvement of its employees in these activities, we encourage anyone with information to report it anonymously to Eskom at 0800 112 722 or via WhatsApp at 081 333 3323,” the power utility said.

It warned that those found on the wrong side of the law would be dealt with decisively, as Eskom had zero tolerance for crime and corruption.

Messy load reduction

Many South Africans also become frustrated with Eskom punishing them with load reduction as a result of high levels of illegal connections in their larger suburbs or extensions.

One user in Centurion said there were hundreds of illegal connections that they had reported constantly over four years.

“Come and remove the illegal connections instead of making us paying clients pay for your insolence,” one user said.

“Go remove the illegal connections at Bambanani mall, next to the N14. Coordinates are here: (-25.9308361, 27.9938510).”

A resident of Cove Rock in East London said Eskom let illegal connections go unchecked and told people reporting them that it could not do anything about them.

It is possible that Eskom is unable to disconnect illegal connections in these areas due to the danger posed to its technicians.

That leaves Eskom with little option but to implement load reduction to protect its infrastructure from overloading.

However, its inadvertent punishment of paying customers served by the same upstream infrastructure could lead to more uptake of solar self-generation, further eating into Eskom’s dwindling electricity revenues.

Illegal prepaid electricity vendors stealing billions

Eskom has also potentially underestimated the impact of illegal prepaid electricity purchases on its revenues.

Towards the end of July 2024, the power utility announced that it had pre-coded roughly 6.6 million prepaid meters as part of a process to update nearly 6.9 million meters used by its prepaid customers.

The key revision number (KRN) update is crucial to prevent all STS-compliant meters worldwide from being unable to accept vouchers after 24 November 2024 due to a built-in security mechanism that will run out of range on that date.

The pre-coding triggers a system function where customers must input update codes to update their meters before new electricity credits can be loaded.

These update tokes are issued alongside electricity vouchers from legitimate vendors.

Despite Eskom’s pre-coding effectively activating the recoding requirement with the customer’s next electricity purchase, only 84,110 meters were recoded between 2 August 2024 and 9 September 2024 — an average of 2,157 per day.

If that rate continues until 24 November 2024, only about 163,907 more Eskom meters will be updated on time. That would leave over 2.6 million Eskom meters un-updated and unable to buy load electricity tokens.

The low update rate is curious, given that around 2.5 million of the current outstanding meters would have needed to do their key revision number (KRN) update before they could load legal electricity tokens since late July 2024.

Considering how Eskom’s Incline Block Tariff functions, it is highly unlikely that all these users have not bought electricity in the past month and a half.

The only way they could be loading electricity is with illegal electricity tokens bought from so-called “ghost” vendors, which use stolen or lost power vending machines.

Alternatively, their meters might have been bypassed illegally, allowing them to consume stolen electricity for free.

MyBroadband previously calculated that the utility could be losing between R18.13 billion and R99.55 billion every year if it had between 1 million and 2.6 million customers buying illegal electricity or bypassing their meters.

This is much higher than Eskom’s own estimate of R5 billion per annum.

Eskom said despite some customers being illegally connected, it remained agile in its efforts to complete the KRN rollover project on time while managing illegally connected customers as an ongoing operational process.

“Through our energy loss management strategy, we focus on extensive disconnections of illegal connections, issuing remedial charges, and pursuing legal action against perpetrators,” Eskom said.