Polokwane Municipality on track with updating of pre-paid meters

POLOKWANE – The Polokwane Municipality is on track with the process to update all previously installed pre-paid utilities meters before the deadline when it will not accept any recharge tokens.

Spokesperson for the municipality, Matshidiso Mothapo confirmed that the municipality has completed approximately 70% of the process by the end of May this year and also took the opportunity to do an audit of the meters.

“We are confident that all the meters will be compliant by as early as November 2023,” Mothapo said.

This follows after it was announced that all prepayment meters based on Standard Transfer Specification (STS) technology will stop dispensing electricity on November 24, 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 unique token identifier (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 and dispensing electricity after the existing credits are used up.

Any tokens generated after this date and utilizing the 24-digit TID, calculated on base date 1993, will be rejected by the meters as being old tokens as the TID value encoded in the token will have reset back to 0.

The STS is used by over 500 utilities across the world in over 40 countries. According to the Standard Transfer Specification Association (STS), South Africa has over 10 million STS electricity prepaid meters, of which seven million are managed by Eskom and over three million are managed by municipalities. Eskom recently announced that it will be starting a national rollout to update the 6.6 million prepaid electricity meters under its control before they become non-operational on 24 November 2024.

The South African Local Government Association (Salga) conducted a survey on the progress with the upgrading of the meters in South African municipalities in July 2021 and it was found that there are 3 092 824 prepaid meters across the country, and only a few municipalities, mainly those based in the Western Cape, Gauteng and Kwazulu-Natal, had started the process of TID rollover.

Salga hosted a workshop on March 24, 2022 to establish the status quo and progress made by municipalities and Eskom in rolling out the prepayment meter reset project; and launched the Salga dashboard for STS prepayment meter monitoring.

The workshop identified what support Salga and its partners (AMEU, STS Association, Sanedi, Eskom, CoGTA and National Treasury) can offer to municipalities. It became clear that there are common challenges across municipalities, and that it is important for municipalities to learn from each another.