- All prepayment meters based on STS technology will stop dispensing electricity on 24 November 2024, thus presenting a significant risk to the service levels, sales and revenue collection of all municipalities to end user customers in the electricity utilities business.
- The TID is referenced to a base date of 1993 and will run out of range in 2024 (known as the TID Rollover event), thus causing the prepayment meter to stop accepting new tokens.
In South Africa, Eskom is responsible for 6.6 million meters and municipalities and metros are responsible for around 4 million meters. The South African Local Government Association (SALGA) is maintaining a dashboard where municipalities self-report their progress with performing the rollover. Only 51 out of the 164 municipalities in South Africa have indicated that they have started their projects on the SALGA tracker. Read more
Eskom kicked off its prepaid meter recode initiative to all its customers around the country earlier this year. This follows a successful roll out of a pilot project in Gauteng where Eskom was able to recode 5 800 meters.
The recoding is a customer Do It Yourself (DIY) process, but Eskom will provide easy step-by-step procedure that will enable a simple recode process. Eskom has communicated with its approved vending agents, to ensure that their systems are enabled for the do-it-yourself recoding. When the recoding starts in a particular area, customers in that area will get two key change tokens with their normal credit token purchases. Customers will know their recode was done correctly when their purchased credit tokens load successfully.
There is NO cost to the customer for recoding their meter. Should anyone request payment for this service, customers are advised to immediately report it to SAPS or Eskom on share call 08600 37566.
Roll out will be phased per residential area, customers are therefore requested to look out for information in their local community or media to know when the recoding will be active in their area and for any updates on the recoding programme.
Author: Bryan Groenendaal
