ECG’s metering system upgrade results in GH¢893 million loss in two months — William Boateng

According to the company, the loss was as a result of customers not paying for the actual amount of power consumed, indebtedness and the on-going process of replacing malfunctioning or obsolete meters.

The Director of Communications of the ECG, William Boateng has told Graphic Online that 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 stressed that once the replacement was completed, the situation was expected to stabilise, thereby improving the company’s revenue fortunes.

Replacement

Mr Boateng, in an interview with Graphic Online’s Emmanuel Bonney said upon the replacement, customers with credit balances on their old meters would receive refunds either remotely or through generated tokens which the customer will manually load unto the meter.

He appealed to all affected customers to exercise patience since their credit balances will be transferred to them after the necessary reconciliations are done.

He advanced that, there were other group of customers who were not purchasing power because their meters were faulty.

The ECG Director of Communication indicated that, though these meters are faulty or obsolete, the company’s metering system can still bill such customers based on their consumption history.

Mr Boateng said upon the replacement, customers who were found to be indebted would be given a payment plan to settle their indebtedness based on their ability to pay.

He also added that, the Company’s old metering system was being upgraded to a more advanced and automated system under its Loss Reduction Project (LRP). “Owing to this, the old metering system was not communicating properly with their servers,” the ECG Director of Communications said.

Communication failure

Mr Boateng,  stated that 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.

Reconciliation

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. Others also had credit balances which were refunded.

He noted that 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.

Mr Boateng stressed that such customers would not be disconnected from the national grid, rather the company would give them payment schedule to settle their indebtedness based on the customer’s ability to pay.

So far, he said, about 935,962 meters would be affected by the upgrading of the prepayment systems and that so far, a total of 488,223 of the old meters had been replaced under the LRP as of July this year and that the exercise was ongoing.