Time running out for people with prepaid electricity meters in South Africa

At around 20:15 on Sunday, 24 November 2024, millions of prepaid electricity meters in South Africa will stop accepting voucher tokens for new units.

Eskom and municipalities around the country have run intensive upgrade programmes and consumer education campaigns to encourage prepaid users to update their meters before the deadline.

The update generally does not require meters to be replaced or for any complex software or hardware change.

In most cases, all that is necessary is for the end user to input two 20-digit codes to update the meter’s Key Revision Number (KRN).

These codes are typically issued when buying electricity recharge vouchers from legitimate vendors.

South Africa is not the only country dealing with this issue. All Standard Transfer Specifications (STS) prepaid meters worldwide will stop accepting new tokens on 24 November.

This is because of an anti-fraud system built into the meters that uses a token identifier (TID), which is essentially a timer that starts running on a specific date and time.

The TID is a 24-bit field denominated in minutes, allowing the timer to count 16,777,215 minutes.

With the KRN set to 1, the TID is counting from midnight on 1 January 1993. Rolling over the KRN to version 2 causes it to start counting from 1 January 2014.

South Africa’s KRN rollover programme started late, causing some concern that many prepaid meters will not be updated in time.

While progress since the start of the year initially looked promising, the programme has stalled, with nearly 2.8 million still not updated.

Eskom’s KRN dashboard shows that it still has 2,435,088 prepaid customers who need to update their meters.

The South African Local Government Association (Salga) operates a similar dashboard for municipalities, which shows they still have 323,031 meters outstanding.

With less than 18 days remaining, Eskom must recode at least 135,283 meters per day to meet the deadline, while municipalities must recode 17,947 meters per day.

Eskom KRN rollover progress

Municipal KRN rollover progress

Eskom’s slow progress comes despite the utility “pre-coding” 6.6 million of its 7 million prepaid meters by mid-July 2024.

Pre-coding means all those meters should have received their KRN rollover codes with their next electricity purchase.

Considering that Eskom’s incline block tariff (IBT) punishes bulk electricity buying, it is unlikely most of these customers had enough electricity to last four months.

The most logical reason for the lag in updates is that the users of these meters are either buying illegal electricity tokens from so-called ghost vendors, or they have illegally bypassed their meters.

This suggests Eskom has likely severely underestimated the impact of electricity theft on its network.

The power utility is conducting wide-scale inspections to address the issue, fining residents R6,050 and disconnecting them until they pay up.

How to update your prepaid electricity meter

Eskom provides a step-by-step guide on updating prepaid electricity meters on its KRN dashboard.

The first step is determining whether your meter has already been recoded.

Enter the code 1844 6744 0738 4377 2416 on their prepaid electricity meter’s keypad to view its status.

The screen will display the number 1 or 2, and in some cases, it may also display letters alongside the KRN number.

If the meter displays the number 1, it is still on KRN 1 and must be recoded to KRN 2.

To recode the meter, Eskom provided the following procedure:

• Get your two key change tokens from your local or online vendor
• Enter the first 20-digit recode token and wait for it to be accepted
• Enter the second 20-digit recode token and wait for it to be accepted
• Enter the 20 digits of your electricity voucher to recharge on KRN version 2