Eskom is confident it will meet the November 24 2024 deadline to have its more than six million meters recoded in the key revision number rollover project, despite less than a million meters having been upgraded over the last two months.
The current prepaid meter software will expire next year and any meter that has not been coded by the deadline will not upload prepaid tokens, which will leave customers without electricity supply.
Eskom executives provided an update on the project at a Thursday briefing led by the general manager of operations enablement in the distribution division, Velaphi Ntuli, who was joined by senior manager for customer services Portia Papu and senior manager for the centre of excellence in retail Dade Mbhele.
Ntuli said Eskom hoped to finish the rollout three months before the deadline to allow the entity space to sort out possible issues and glitches in time.
He explained that the utility has more than 6.8-million meters that require recoding to ensure they function properly after the deadline and that this not only affects Eskom, but all prepaid meters complying with STS (standard transfer specification).
“What I would like to assure the public [of] is that we at Eskom started working on this quite a while back, a few years [ago]. We've been updating and upgrading our back-end system to be able to handle this. So there's a lot of preparation that has been going on in the background to make sure that when we get to this point of rollover, we are ready to do that.
“During this preparation, we also looked at what was happening worldwide and locally to decide on the method that we'll use to roll over, the effectiveness of that and also to look at the challenges ... that we needed to deal with,” he said.
Ntuli explained that Eskom embarked on a “soft rollout” in August this year, which saw 672,000 Eskom-controlled meters updated over a two-month period.
Eskom set a target of 30,000 meters per province between August and September and that it achieved this.
He said Eskom is offering a do-it-yourself approach that would allow customers to make the switch themselves through getting a token to put in their meter.
Support is available to assist customers with any challenges they encounter.
Eskom also addressed the issue of illegally connected households, saying while most of these households did not usually purchase electricity, those whose meters are still functional would be able to do a switchover. This would, however, also mean ghost vending tokens will no longer work.
“We are working through our community co-ops to try to ensure we eradicate the issue of illegal connections and we understand the scrutiny that they come under but we actually want to encourage our communities that are illegally connected to work with us,” Ntuli said.
We are working through our community co-ops to try to ensure that we eradicate the issue of illegal connections and we understand the scrutiny that they come under but we actually want to encourage our communities that are illegally connected to work with us
— Velaphi Ntuli
Papu explained the project was moving on from phase one, which focused mainly on dealing with glitches and constraints in the project, to phase two which is currently under way.
“Our strategy for this phase is to target the bigger township codes, where we have a lot of customers sitting in one SGC [supply group code] code. When we're about to change areas, we will notify customers through local media that we are ready for them to be able to do the recoding of the meters,” she said.
The last phase of the project will see the utility focus on customers that have not made the switch within the first two phases.
Mbhele said Eskom will rely on a number of communication channels available for customers to use during the rollout: the Alfred chatbot on their website, which handles general and KRN-related questions, the Eskom contact centre, social media platforms as well as personnel from the utility among others.
“So what we have done is that in the areas that we are rolling out or have been rolling out, Eskom personnel have physically gone out into those areas and that is the support that we are continuing to roll out,” she said.
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