• A problem impacting prepaid electricity meters later this year may have provided a window into the scale of electricity meter fraud in South Africa.
• Data suggests that over 40% of Eskom, City Power, and eThekwini meters are 'non-vending,' or aren't being used to sell electricity.
•This doesn't necessarily mean that all of the meters have been bypassed to steal electricity, but Eskom says it is the most common reason.
New data suggests that roughly 40% of the prepaid electricity meters controlled by Eskom, the City of Johannesburg and eThekwini are "non-vending", which may indicate the scale of the meter fraud problem for the authorities.
Several authorities may have uncovered the vast scale of prepaid electricity meter fraud in their supply areas while attempting to avoid disaster when the meters expire later this year.
This means that the meters are not currently being used to vend electricity. This does not necessarily mean that the meter owners are stealing electricity from authorities by bypassing their meters or buying electricity credits from non-authorised vendors; however, Silas Mulaudzi, a sustainable energy specialist at the South African Local Government Association (Salga), said that this was the most common explanation for why a meter would not be vending electricity.
While authorities and revenue protection specialists have suspected that there has been mass prepaid electricity meter fraud in the distribution zones of some authorities, it has been very difficult to estimate the scale of the problem.
However, the token identifier (TID) rollover has offered a unique window into the problem.
The TID rollover is a date rollover issue affecting all of the more than 70 million STS-certified prepaid electricity meters spread across the world. Essentially, the vending system that allows users to load electricity credit onto their meters will run out of new combinations on 24 November 2024, owing to a quirk in the way the system was designed.
If meters are not updated by this date, meter owners will be left in the dark when their credit runs out, unable to load new tokens into the meter.
To avoid the issue, two unique 20-digit update numbers, known as key change numbers, need to be generated and entered into every meter. The key change numbers update the software used on the vending machine to a new standard and allow new credit tokens to be entered into and accepted by the meter.
In South Africa, Eskom is responsible for 6.9 million meters, and municipalities are collectively responsible for 4.6 million meters.
To perform the update, most authorities, including Eskom, decided to generate and send the key change numbers to customers when they bought electricity credit. This meant that users were sent three 20-digit numbers when buying electricity credit, instead of the usual one token, when they were meant to update their meters.
Authorities, including Eskom and the City of Cape Town, reported great success with this method, as the vast majority of paying customers were able to update their meters without requesting assistance.
This meant that authorities were able to make fast progress when they finally got their update projects under way.
Eskom was able to update 600 000 meters, or roughly 10% of its base, in the first two months of starting its initiative in August last year.
However, Eskom, and several other authorities, recently hit a plateau in the process. Eskom publishes its rollover progress on a dashboard and municipalities self-report their data through a portal maintained by Salga.
Eskom confirmed that it had "pre-coded" 6.6 million of the 6.9 million meters under its control in August. Any of these 6.6 million customers who bought an electricity token would have received the key change numbers at the same time.
However, as of the middle of September, there are still 2.9 million meters listed on the Eskom dashboard as not having been moved onto the new vending standard.
Portia Papu, a senior manager of project execution at Eskom Distribution, explained to News24 at the time that there were four possible reasons why the meters would not already have been on the new standard.
These are:
• They have bypassed their meter.
• They are buying tokens from a non-licensed vendor.
• They bought a large amount of electricity credit, and have not yet found cause to buy more.
• The meter is in an area that has been disconnected by Eskom.
Mulaudzi said that fraud, in the form of meter bypassing, was the most common reason that a meter will be non-vending.
Mulaudzi said that certain municipalities and metros have identified the non-vending meters in their systems and removed them from the TID rollover tracking dashboard.
In Johannesburg, for example, the dashboard previously indicated that City Power needed to roll over over 280 000 meters, but now only lists 154 000 meters. Mulaudzi said that the difference is the number of meters that the metro had identified as being non-vending.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said that the utility has identified 142 282 meters which are not vending electricity.
"While City Power has made tremendous progress in updating meter codes for customers who are vending, a significant challenge has remained with 142 282 customers whose meters not vending, primarily due to tampering," he said.
He said that City Power officials have experienced resistance when trying to enter the homes of individuals who have bypassed their meters.
"Throughout the entire period of the rollout of the TID project, these customers with bypassed meters, have been refusing to give our technicians access to their properties," he said.
He said that City Power has experienced success with its revenue protection measures in some areas, such as Rabie Ridge.
Mulaudzi said that eThekwini had also removed non-vending meters from the dashboard.
eThekwini previously identified 436 000 meters under its control, but now only lists 260 000 on the dashboard. If these meters were removed because they are non-paying customers, it would mean that there were 176 000 such cases in the metro.
eThekwini spokesperson Gugu Sisilana told News24 that the metro has finished the rollover of all purchasing meters.
"The unit has completed rolling over all its purchasing prepaid electricity meters and does not anticipate any inconvenience for its customers once the deadline comes on the 24th of November 2024. The figures that are currently not represented on Salga statistics, may be prepaid electricity meters suspected to be bypassed," she said.
Sisilana said that the city's electricity unit has a comprehensive plan to replace bypassed meters in "the coming months" through the National Treasury's procurement initiative.
This week, News24 revealed that eThekwini paid a service provider R500 million for smart prepaid meters, despite the fact that a pilot project showed the meters did not work. The contract is under investigation after auditors flagged a litany of irregularities in the deal.
One perk of the TID rollover event is that it will essentially put an end to a practice known as ghost vending.
Ghost vending is a practice where electricity vending occurs outside of registered vending systems. Some criminals have got their hands on the keys required to generate electricity tokens. They use these keys to generate electricity tokens and sell them to people at a discount on what you could get from a registered vendor.
When the vending system moves on to a new standard, these stolen keys will no longer be capable of generating valid tokens.
Mulaudzi said that the event has also allowed municipalities to clean their databases.
"This is the best opportunity that municipalities have come across to clean their database, to implement revenue protection and of course to clean up the non-vending meters," he said.
He said that Salga is now confident that good paying customers will now avoid being cut off from service on the rollover date.
Eskom did not respond to questions from News24 by publication.
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