By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Minister of Electricity and Energy Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa has urged South Africans to recode their Eskom prepaid meters by Sunday to avoid further disruptions.
Ramokgopa said during the media briefing, Eskom won’t extend the prepaid meter recoding deadline (24 November 2024).
The utility’s 6.9 million prepaid meters currently using the outdated KRN1 (Key Revision Number 1) will no longer accept electricity tokens after this date, rendering them inoperable once existing credit runs out.
Eskom’s group executive for distribution, Monde Bala said customers who fail to recode their meters could face replacement costs of up to R12 000.
“Customers with meters still on KRN1 have likely not purchased electricity for more than six months or might be using unauthorised tokens bought from criminal syndicates. To prevent the meter from becoming inoperable, losing power, and incurring replacement costs, it is critical that all customers, including those who have not purchased electricity in the last six months or more, to buy electricity tokens from authorised vendors by 24 November 2024.
“This will provide them with two sets of 20-digit codes needed to recode and update their meters. We started our public awareness campaigns back in August 2023 and we continue to ask users to come forward so we can offer all the help we have available,” Bala said.
And those who updated prepaid electricity meters will be able to load new tokens on them for at least another 21 years.
All prepaid meters provided by Eskom and South African municipalities over the past few decades use Standard Transfer Specification (STS), a global standard for the transfer of electricity and other utility prepaid tokens.
Although STS was initially launched in South Africa after being developed by Eskom, a non-profit organisation called the STS Association took over its management and expansion in 1997.
More than 500 power utilities now use it in over 40 countries, including Indonesia, which has around five times the number of STS-compliant meters as in South Africa.
The STS standard is a secure message system for carrying information between a point-of-sale and an electricity meter.
It comes with a date and time-based security system that avoids several issues from occurring in the electricity vending and loading process, including:
- Fraudulent transfer of credit resulting from hit-and-miss attempts at entering the correct number
- Fraudulent token generation from a stolen vending station
- Fraudulent token generation from legitimate vending stations outside of the utility’s area
- Fraudulent token reuse
- Tampering of legitimate tokens, such as changing the value of the purchased electricity
To enable the above, a part of each generated token is embedded with a unique token identifier (TID) corresponding to the minute the token was bought, starting from one minute after midnight on 1 January 1993.
The TID consists of a 24-bit field that can count 16,777,216 minutes before it runs out of range.
The minutes had to be limited, or else customers would have to enter increasingly longer tokens as time went by, making the electricity-loading process more inconvenient.
The last time users with meters still on the base date will be able to buy an electricity token is 20:15 on 24 November 2024.