Around four in ten prepaid electricity meters in major centres are believed to be functioning irregularly, News24 has reported.
These include meters controlled by Eskom, City Power (Johannesburg) and eThekwini. Described as “non-vending”, this indicates they may have been bypassed or may be defective in some way.
This has been revealed as a result of a peculiarity in the design of the meters – the so-called token identifier rollover – which requires that meters be updated by late November, or clients will be unable to upload new electricity tokens.
To address this, numerical keys were to be sent to clients when they purchased tokens.
However, limited uptake in this process raised questions about the operation of the metering. Eskom, for example, controls 6.9 million meters, but as of mid-September, around 2.9 million had not received their keys – after a year of the programme having been initiated.
This might be due to one of four factors: the meters had been bypassed; electricity tokens were being sourced from unauthorised dealers; the meters were in an area which had been disconnected; the clients had already bought so much electricity that they did not need to replenish during the year.
It is likely that bypassing is the most common reason.
Of the 285 000 meters in Johannesburg, 155,000 were “vending” and the rest “non-vending”. In eThekwini, of 436,000 meters, 261 000 meters were “vending”, and 175,000 “non-vending”.