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- A problem affecting prepaid electricity meters will result in them becoming non-functional next year unless they are updated.
- A handful of municipalities have either completed or made great progress with the project.
- Most authorities though, including Eskom, have hardly started the process.
- For more stories, visit the Tech and Trends homepage.
A handful of municipalities have completed or nearly finished an update required to prevent prepaid electricity meters from not functioning next year. Most authorities though, including Eskom, haven’t or have hardly started the process and time is running out.
There are approximately 10 million STS-compliant prepaid electricity meters in South Africa that will become non-operational on 24 November 2024 due to a Y2K style date rollover issue, unless they are updated before then. The real number could be higher than this though.
The issue that will prevent them from accepting tokens after this date is baked into the code of the meters.
When electricity meters were designed, a system was needed to ensure that the codes that users enter into their meters to vend electricity were unique.
One of the ways this was done was to attach a section of the 20-digit token that users enter into their electricity meters to the minute that the token was bought.
But this came with a catch.
There were only so many minutes that could be attached to the tokens before the 20-digit number became too long for users to enter into the meters.
So when the prepaid meters were launched in 1993, there were only 224 minutes, or 16 777 216 total minutes that were able to be attached to a token.
That means that prepaid electricity meters have a built-in expiry date. This happens to elapse on 24 November 2024, after which users will not be able to vend electricity unless their meters are updated.
This will essentially leave users in the dark and reduce the revenue that they raise from the sale of electricity.
The problem is global and affects approximately 70 million electricity meters and water and gas meters in around 100 countries.
READ MORE | Prepaid electricity crisis: There might be more than 70 million meters that stop working next year
The update is relatively simple to perform. Two uniquely generated 20 digit update tokens, known as key revision numbers, need to be manually entered into each individual meter and they will be ready to vend electricity after the rollover date.
In South Africa though, many authorities have not started their projects.
Eskom for example, recently told News24 that it has 6.6 million meters to update, but has so far only updated 5 800 in a pilot project in Gauteng. This is despite the fact that the utility knew about the need for the project back in 2011, according to the Financial Mail.
On the municipal front, only 47 out of the 164 municipalities and metros with licensed electricity distribution zones in South Africa have indicated that they have started their projects on a South African Local Government Association (Salga) dashboard.
The numbers that the dashboard reflect were previously inaccurate, but have now been fixed, according to Dr Silas Mulaudzi, a sustainable energy specialist at Salga.
The site said there are 4.2 million meters that had been logged by authorities and so far just over 850 000 had been updated.
Many municipalities had not logged data on the site so the total number of meters may change in the future.
Some smaller municipalities had completed or almost completed their projects though. These municipalities are ready for when D-day arrives.
Their experience could provide some insight into the challenges that will be faced by other authorities yet to get their projects off the ground.
Starting early
Delphine Thorne, who headed up the rollover project in the Karoo-based Dr Beyers Naude municipality, said the municipality was first notified about the need for the update in 2015.
She remembered the preparations undertaken for Y2K and realised that the municipality needed to do something soponer rather than later.
She said they entered a partnership with Utilities World who were contracted to perform the TID rollover and perform an audit of the meters to check for non-functional or bypassed meters at the same time. The meters of these non-paying customers were brought back online so the municipality could recover that lost revenue.
"We did it as a two-in-one project. While we were doing the key changes we did the audit simultaneously," she said.
The upfront cost to the municipality for this two-for-one package? Zero.
Utilities World covered the capital costs of performing the rollover and the audit in exchange for a portion of the recovered revenue.
Brian Hill, Utilities World director, lauded this partnership as a great success, as did Thorne.
"We performed a complete sweep of all their 11 000 meters and updated 98% of them on the first pass. This was completed over six months between June and December 2019," said Hill.
Hill added:
Thorne said that the revenue that the municipality received from the sale of electricity increased by around a million rand every month - from R3.9 million to R4.9 million.
And these revenue gains were sustained, said Thorne.
Hill said the level of meter non-compliance before the audit was around 20%. This was brought down to 13% after the project was finished.
The remaining 2% of meters had been updated over the past 18 months and are essentially complete, said Hill.
Thorne said it was mostly holiday houses that were difficult to reach which is why the last few meters took such a long time.
Stephen Cooper, the manager of electricity services at the Cape Agulhas municipality said that holiday houses were a big challenge for the municipality when they performed the rollover.
Cape Agulhas is home to popular holiday destinations such as Arniston, Agulhas and Struisbaai.
He said that holiday houses were "the biggest headache", as a lot of houses are only occupied for three to six weeks of the year.
"The prepaid meter stands inside the property so you are never going to get there unless you catch the guy at the house."
He said there were 10 people, split into teams of two, performing the update in the municipality. They worked right the way through the year including holidays such as Christmas and Easter in order to complete the project.
The holiday periods were a good time to catch the holiday homeowners.
Cape Agulhas made use of a similar approach to Dr Beyers Naude as they contracted Ontec to perform their rollover and audit at the same time.
Cooper said the municipality heard about the rollover for the first time around six years ago.
"I got to a stage where I realised 'we have three years left; we have 12 000 meters; let's do it now so that if there are issues we have plenty of time to catch up'," said Cooper.
It took them 12 months to complete the project.
Cape Agulhas did not really recover much revenue from completing the audit as Cooper said that they already ran revenue recovery projects before this.
This meant that they did have to pay to complete their projects. In the order of R1.5 million was spent to roll over the 12 000 meters in the area.
The issue with holiday homes was echoed by Mossel Bay Municipality’s municipal manager Colin Puren.
Mossel Bay became aware of the need for the project in 2018 and entered into a similar partnership as the other municipalities with Utilities World in 2019.
The rollover project in Mossel Bay is ongoing and, as of 29 May 2023, 91.3%, or 33 235 of the 36 506 local prepaid meters have been updated.
"In Mossel Bay Municipality's case, there are many holiday homes where access to meters remains a problem. Special arrangements need to be made with the owners to access the meters," said Puren.
Mossel Bay launched a communication drive to ensure that residents were aware what the project would entail. Here is a copy of one of the notices that was distributed on various platforms:
Concern for others
Mossel Bay executive mayor, Dirk Kotzé, said it would have been impossible for the municipality to have completed the project if they only started now.
"If we had only started with the project now, it would have been impossible to complete the project before November 2024. The only other option would be to ask consumers to do the rollover themselves, but there will be challenges.”
Cooper and Thorne are concerned about those authorities that had not yet started their projects.
Both Dr Beyers Naude and Cape Agulhas also tried to use a point-of-purchase update system in some areas.
Using this system, individuals who buy electricity credit like they normally do, will be given the two update tokens to enter into the meters at the same time. This means they will receive three 20-digit tokens at the point of sale - one to load electricity credit and the other two are required to roll over their meter.
This is the system that Eskom will be using to update its 6.6 million meters. Eskom told News24 earlier this year that the utility is confident that the project will be completed in time.
Thorne and Cooper foresee trouble.
"When we were giving people the key change tokens to take to their houses, they would not get it right."
She said the update numbers need to be entered in a specific sequence and people would struggle with that, meaning one of their electricians would need to be sent to the home to assist.
Cooper said they achieved some success with point-of-purchase rollovers, but he wouldn't want to do that at scale.
He said:
He said there are a lot of problematic meters, even if only 1% or 2% of people struggle to perform the update themselves.
The City of Cape Town has been using the point-of-purchase method to update its meters and it has seemingly been a success.
According to the Salga dashboard, Cape Town is 59% of the way through the over 700 000 meters that it has to update.
In response to questions put to the City last year, Beverley van Reenen, the Cape Town mayoral committee member for energy, said it began updating meters in November 2021 after a pilot was conducted before this.
The project is being completed in-house by City staff. Van Reenen said it is "relatively straightforward" for customers to update their own meters.
Other metros, including Johannesberg and Tshwane said they had started their projects.
Other municipalities that had made significant progress in the rollover project include Newcastle, Ba-Phalaborwa, Drakenstein, and Polokwane.
Benefits and consequences
Those municipalities that are performing revenue protection actions at the same time as the meter updates are generally reporting a 30% increase in electricity revenue, according to Don Taylor, who is heading up the rollover project.
"This is not unexpected, given the high level of fraud and poor meter management practices in many municipalities," he said.
Taylor invented the first integrated prepayment meter.
Hill said that the level of electricity revenue recovery can range anywhere from 5% to 70% depending on the area. However, this does not generally exceed 20%, said Hill.
But the time to get excited about a big revenue recovery drive at the same time as the update had passed, Hill argued.
"It's now too late for the municipalities to suddenly get excited about a big revenue enhancement drive," said Hill.
"Especially the bigger ones, with 40, 50, 60 000 meters – you're never going to get to all of those meters in time."
Hill said that the focus needs to be on rolling over the meters of paying customers and a targeted approach should be adopted to deal with non-paying customers.
READ MORE | Sun has set on golden opportunity to clamp down on rampant electricity meter fraud in SA
Riccardo Pucci, a TID rollover project coordinator at the Standard Transfer Specification Association (STSA) said earlier this year that there will be a dramatic increase in the prevalence of meter fraud if a significant amount of meters are not updated before the rollover date.
"You are going to get record numbers of meter bypasses. That's essentially what's going to end up happening. If the revenue protection problem was an issue before, it's going to skyrocket," said Pucci.
"And the customers won't know. They are just going to say, 'Well, it stopped working. I'm just going to bypass my meter."
