South Africa has just 100 days left to switch over its prepaid meter software so they can continue functioning.
South Africa’s current pre-paid electricity meter software, which generates unique recharge codes, will expire on 24 November 2024.
Eskom and municipalities across the country have been rolling out processes to update the software, but time is now running out.
The prepaid meter update process requires a manual ‘reset’ code, which must be entered into the prepaid meter like normal recharge codes.
If not done, residents will not be able to load electricity after the deadline.
On Friday (16 August), the Western Cape confirmed that it had reset approximately 96% of all meters within its municipal supply areas versus the national average, which currently sits at 75.8%.
There are approximately 11.5 million prepaid meters in South Africa, most of which are Eskom’s.
Eskom oversees roughly 6.9 million of the STS-complaint prepaid meters in South Africa, while a further 4.6 million are in the homes and businesses of municipal customers.
According to Eskom’s key revision number dashboard, of the 6.9 million prepaid meters on its system, only 4 million are operating on the new system (as of 15 August 2024).
This poses a huge problem as 2.9 million Eskom customers alone still need to switch over.
Eskom’s data shows that 6.6 million prepaid meters have been ‘pre-coded’, which should make the process easier.
Pre-coding is an internal procedure where Eskom prepares the meters for issuing recoding tokens—but this precedes the recoding, and relies on customers completing the switchover with a do-it-yourself (DIY) process.
With only 100 days remaining, this means that an average of 29,000 customers a day need to complete the rollover recoding process to meet the deadline.
For the recoding DIY process, customers whose pre-payment meters have been pre-coded for Key Revision Number (KRN) rollover are required to first purchase their top-up prepaid electricity tokens from authorised vendors and then input the provided key change tokens into their meters.
The process is as follows:
- Key in the first 20 digits of the recode token and wait for it to be accepted.
- Key in the second 20 digits of the recode token and wait for it to be accepted.
- Very important: Key in the 20 digits of your purchased token to recharge your meter.
Without this pre-coding, customers who have not completed the manual DIY recoding process by 24 November 2024 will not be able to purchase or load their top-up prepaid electricity tokens, Eskom warned.
Additionally, if a meter is pre-coded and the customer buys illegal prepaid tokens from illegal or ghost vendors, they will not be able to recode or load the illegal top-up prepaid electricity tokens.
Other meters
According to the South African Local Government Association (SALGA) dashboard on the rollout, approximately 1.1 million meters still need to be reset.
With 100 days remaining, municipalities have to switchover an average of 11,000 customers a day to meet the deadline.
Combined with Eskom, this is 40,000 meters a day.
Read: R200 prepaid electricity tax changes coming – with a big catch
