Drive to upgrade prepaid meters will also help Eskom with revenue protection - Ramokgopa
Customers have until this Sunday to recode their meters, as the KRN1 meters won't accept electricity tokens thereafter, leaving users in the dark.
A prepaid electricity meter and an electricity mains unit. Picture: @CityofCT/X
JOHANNESBURG - Electricity Minister Kgosientsho Ramakgopa said that the drive to upgrade prepaid meters will also help Eskom with revenue protection.
Customers have until this Sunday to recode their meters, as the KRN1 meters won't accept electricity tokens thereafter, leaving users in the dark.
A little over two million meters were yet to be migrated by Wednesday, and while Ramokgopa said the deadline wouldn’t be extended, efforts have been ramped up to get homes online before Monday.
"We know where the concentration of people who have not updated is geographically, so we are going to allocate resources relative to the concentration of what is outstanding."
Meanwhile, 6.9 million meters have been upgraded.
Ramokgopa explained how this process had also helped clamp down on the sale of electricity on the black market.
"All they had to do was to purchase, replenish their units, so people who are the majority of people, a significant number of people who are outside this number, is a zero buyer. What is a zero buyer?Some one who has a prepaid meter, has been consuming but has never bought from Eskom, or in the past six to eight months, has never bought, which means there's another means of them replenishing their meters."