Joburg residents must update prepaid meters themselves as City Power bungles project

• City Power is changing tack after making little progress with avoiding a prepaid electricity disaster later this year.
• All prepaid electricity meters are due to stop working on 24 November this year.
• Citizens will now have to update the meters themselves to avoid disaster.
• For more financial news, go to the News24 Business front page.

City Power is handing the responsibility to update prepaid electricity meters over to citizens after making little progress with their own attempts at preventing catastrophe later this year when all the devices are due to stop working on the same day.

On 24 November this year, STS prepaid electricity meters will run out of new combinations of electricity tokens owing to a date rollover issue that will affect the vending system.

There are roughly 11.5 million of these meters in South Africa and over 70 million in the world, spread out over 100 countries. All of these will stop working beyond the rollover date unless the meters are updated. The issue is called the token identifier (TID) rollover.

A month ago, Eskom announced that it had tackled just under half of the 6.8 million meters that it is responsible for. Just over half of the meters in municipal distribution zones have been updated.

READ | As D-day looms for prepaid electricity meters, Eskom, municipalities have tackled just under half

The update is reasonably simple to perform.

Two unique 20-digit numbers, known as key change tokens, need to be generated and entered into every meter and they will be ready to vend electricity beyond the rollover date. As things stand, residents cannot generate the numbers themselves, and must wait for authorities to provide them.

Some authorities have sent designated task teams to every house in a supply area to generate and enter the numbers on behalf of users.

This was the route taken in Johannesburg when City Power started its rollover project. City Power made a bold promise to send 200 City Power officials out to people's homes each day with the goal of rolling over 4 000 meters a day.

But the teams came nowhere near this goal, having only updated a measly 38 000 meters eight months later. 

A back-of-the-napkin calculation shows that an average of 160 meters were rolled over per day by City Power for the last eight months.

City Power is responsible for 284 000 meters, meaning the city will need to update an average of 1 080 meters every day from now until 24 November if all the meters are to be updated. 

In a statement, City Power acknowledged that progress had been slower than expected. It explained that officials had been struggling to gain access to people’s homes.

City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena told News24 that nothing went wrong with the in-person method, but progress had been slower than in other municipalities.

"It was a slow start for us in comparison to other municipalities," he said. However, he said that the problem was not the city starting too late.

"Before you set up things like this kind of thing, you also need to make sure that your house is in order," he said.

New plan

City Power is changing tack in a bid to accelerate progress.

Rather than sending task teams to people’s houses, the city will send the key revision numbers directly to residents to enter into the meter themselves. This is the system that has been deployed by Eskom and some municipalities such as Cape Town to good effect. 

Having started late in 2022, the City of Cape Town is 92% complete with its rollover project using the do-it-yourself method. Cape Town had substantially more meters to address than Joburg, with close on 650 000.

READ | Prepaid electricity crisis: Municipalities need a plan of action as meter update deadline approaches

Mangena said that the DIY method would be used in some areas and that City Power would persist with in-person rollovers in other areas. The DIY rollovers will start on 15 April, and Mangena said that a schedule for which areas will receive the tokens would be received before the end of the week.

What customers need to do

When a suburb is active, as will be indicated by the schedule when it is released, residents will receive three 20-digit numbers when they next buy an electricity token.

Two of these numbers will be the key revision numbers that users must enter into their meter and one of the tokens will be to load the newly purchased credit on to the meter. 

The numbers must be entered into the meter in the correct sequence for the credit to load and the update to complete. If the new credit is loaded, then the update was performed successfully.

If a customer struggles to execute the process, then City Power advises that users notify them and technicians can be dispatched to assist with the process.