The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) recorded a revenue shortfall of over GH¢893.2 million between July and August this year as part of the ongoing process of upgrading prepayment metering system in its operational areas.
According to the company, the loss was as a result of customers not paying for the actual amount of power consumed, indebtedness and the ongoing process of replacing malfunctioning or obsolete meters.
The Director of Communications of the ECG, William Boateng, told the Ghanaian Times in an interview in Accra on Wednesday on the upgrading exercise.
He said there was the need to replace some “obsolete meters” since it was a mandatory exercise sanctioned by the PURC that it should not operate with any obsolete equipment, and named those being replaced to include the BXC, PNX, Ecash 1, 2, 3, 4 and Nuri and BOT meters.
“These are meters that have run their due course, they were not working accurately and needed to be replaced,” he emphasised and said that once the replacement was completed, the situation was expected to stabilise, thereby improving the company’s revenue fortunes.
Mr Boateng said that upon the replacement, customers with credit balances on their old meters would receive refunds either remotely or through generated tokens which the customer would manually load unto the meter.
He appealed to all affected customers to exercise patience since their credit balances would be transferred to them after the necessary reconciliations were done, adding no customer would be “shortchanged” under the upgrading of the prepayment metering system.
Mr Boateng said there were other group of customers who were not purchasing power because their meters were faulty.
“Though these meters are faulty or obsolete, the company’s metering system can still bill such customers based on their consumption history,” he stated, adding that “upon the replacement, customers who are found to be indebted will be given a payment plan to settle their indebtedness based on their ability to pay.”
The Director of Communications said the company’s old metering system was being upgraded to a more advanced and automated system under its Loss Reduction Project (LRP) and due to this the old metering system was not communicating properly with their servers.
He said so far, about 935,962 meters would be affected by the upgrading of the prepayment systems, and that a total of 488,223 of the old meters had been replaced under the LRP as of July this year as part of the ongoing exercise.
Mr Boateng said because of the communication failure, customers who purchased power were not being deducted since the meters transitioned into a postpaid mode.
He added that when the connection between the servers and the metering system was normalised, the system had to reconcile the purchase history of customers as against the actual power consumed within the period of the break in communication.
“After the reconciliation based on customer’s consumption history, some customers were indebted to the company and had to visit their offices to settle them and others had credit balances which were refunded.
According to him, customers who were indebted were dissatisfied because in their view, they were purchasing power and therefore did not know they were indebted to the company.
BY KINGSLEY ASARE
