Non-paying customers will not get service from City Power

City Power will no longer respond to outage calls from customers who continue to refuse to pay for electricity, including customers with non-vending meters, non-paying customers or defaulting customers.

Spokesperson Isaac Mangena said the decision comes as the entity battles pressures of the grid amid load-shedding and low revenue collection targets.

“The entity has started an auditing process of the customers’ meters and assessed their vending history before dispatching a team to attend to the calls. During a medium-voltage outage, at least 70% of the customers in that area should be paying customers, if not, our technicians will not go ahead with investigation, repairs or restore power.

“For this reason, we have embarked on a city-wide programme to ensure we get as many citizens as possible to pay for their electricity services – those that can.

“For those that can’t, the city has programmes to assist the indigent residents. The Local Government Municipal Systems Management Act 32 of 2000, and the National Credit Act indicate that City Power is within its right to ensure it installs the prepaid meters for revenue collection on behalf of the city.

“As City Power we operate in an environment that often has complex and often expensive priorities and expectations from a variety of stakeholders. We will increase our efforts to collect outstanding debt from customers across the City of Johannesburg.

“In recent months, City Power embarked on an aggressive revenue collection drive to collect money from all our customers in the city. This is about R10bn we are owed by the residents of the city,” he said.

In addition, City Power has embarked on a programme to audit and normalise meters across the seven regions of the city, which will also involve the resetting of the meters to be TID compliant ahead of the 2024 November deadline.

The programme will also assist City Power to clean up its data and ensure unmetered customers, especially in non-affluent areas, have smart meters which will enable them to, not only buy electricity but also assist City Power in remotely monitoring and control the load as they battle with load-shedding.

Customers with bridged or bypassed meters, as well as defaulting customers are encouraged to visit their nearest service delivery centre to make payment arrangements that are available to the customers.

“We appeal to residents for cooperation and to allow our officials to gain access to their properties when they come to audit and normalise meters. As these audits will be vital in the preparation for the TID rollover as some of the meters cannot be reprogrammed.

“The TID resetting entails that every non-smart (old technology) meter should be replaced with the new technology meters. These old technology meters will stop accepting the credit tokens by November 2024 as the credit token will run out of available numbers.

“City Power has already written to the residents of Naturena informing them of our decision not to respond to electricity outages in their area until our teams are allowed to come and normalise the area to ensure revenue collection is enhanced. The residents have been given until Friday to allow our team to audit meters.

“Should the resistance continue, we will no longer respond to power outages in Naturena from May 12,” explained Mangena.