Long queues as prepaid electricity meter deadline looms

Eskom is seeing long queues outside some of its offices thanks to the looming deadline for updating prepaid electricity meters on 24 November 2024, GroundUp reports.

The publication said it found elderly pensioners wrapped in blankets sitting on the cold pavement outside Eskom’s Louis Trichardt offices this past Thursday, where more than 170 customers were queuing.

According to the report, some people said they’ve had to queue more than once when they weren’t served the first time.

“If I don’t get served today, I won’t come back because I don’t have transport money,” said Annah Manganye (68) from Valdezia, 40km away, who arrived at 06:30 that morning and was 172nd in line.

The office has three staff members and serves residents from surrounding villages, including Elim, Valdenzhia and Kutama Sinthumule, has three staff members.

GroundUp spoke to Eskom manager Netshavheni Nenguda, who said that when they started the update last year, most customers didn’t visit to upgrade their meters.

“Now with the cutoff date approaching, the numbers are increasing,” he said.

Nenguda said they were committed to serving everyone in the queue the same day.

The chairperson of the Zoutpansberg Community Development Forum, Patrick Sikhutshi, has called for an extension of the deadline.

However, that is not possible because the deadline is determined by the system the vast majority of prepaid meters in South Africa uses, called the Standard Transfer Specification (STS).

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).

This is also not unique to South Africa. All meters compliant with this standard worldwide will stop accepting new tokens at 20:15 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 2.6 million still not updated.

Eskom’s KRN dashboard shows that it still has 2.3 million 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 over 300,000 meters outstanding.

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