Eskom has successfully pre-coded 6.6 million out of its 6.9 million pre-payment meters to ensure customers will be able to continue to seamlessly purchase electricity beyond the 24 November deadline.
This, as a new series of electricity vending codes will be introduced to all meters in South Africa.
In a statement, the power utility says 24 November is the cut-off date for meters to be recoded to continue to accept prepaid tokens.
Without this, it notes, customers who have not completed the manual do-it-yourself (DIY) recoding process by 24 November will not be able to purchase or load their top-up prepaid electricity tokens.
Additionally, if a meter is pre-coded and the customer buys illegal prepaid tokens from illegal or ghost vendors, they will not be able to recode or load the illegal top-up prepaid electricity tokens.
According to the state-owned company, all prepayment meters based on STS technology will stop accepting new credit tokens because of the expiry of these vending codes.
It adds that this will mean they will stop dispensing electricity after the existing credit is used up, making the meter inactive.
Each credit token has a unique token identifier (TID) encoded in the 20 digits to prevent token replay at the meter. The TID is referenced to a base date of 1993 and will run out of range in 2024 (known as the TID rollover event), causing the prepayment meter to stop accepting new tokens.
Monde Bala, Eskom group executive for distribution, says: “We have changed our approach to deliver the goal of making it as easy as possible for customers using prepaid meters to do so seamlessly after 24 November.
“We decided to refocus our resources to pre-code the meters via our central systems, in addition to still promoting the DIY approach, where we had been encouraging customers to recode their meters now.
“Thanks to pre-coding, customers can now effortlessly continue to purchase electricity from authorised vendors with ease after 24 November, safe and confident in the knowledge that their pre-payment meters are either recoded to accept purchased tokens or pre-coded for recoding and can accept tokens purchased through all our official channels,” says Bala.
Eskom is urging customers to input all previously purchased credit tokens from authorised vendors into their meter before entering their new meter recoding tokens.
It points out that pre-coding of the meters will not impact the usage of old credit tokens until the DIY process is completed. This is crucial as old credit tokens will not function after the meter is recoded by a customer through the DIY process, it states.
Pre-coding is an internal procedure where Eskom prepares the meters for the issuance of recoding tokens.
This process precedes the recoding, which is a DIY process. For the recoding DIY process, customers whose pre-payment meters have been pre-coded for key revision number rollover are required to first purchase their top-up prepaid electricity tokens from authorised vendors and then input the provided key change tokens into their meters.
The progress of the key revision number rollover is monitored daily via a dashboard and customer support is provided through various simplified mechanisms, says the utility.
“Eskom would like to remind customers that the recoding of pre-payment meters is a free service and warns against scammers who may try to exploit the re-coding process by requesting payment for this service,” the power utility urges.
“The process of purchasing electricity remains the same. Customers can continue to buy electricity from major banks, online platforms, fuel stations, authorised prepaid electricity vending agents and retailers nationwide,” it concludes.