City Power has labelled their reason for billing inconsistencies during the new ‘smart’ meter roll-out, as “teething problems”.
In a statement released by the entity recently, City Power claimed that “the project to roll out smart meters across Johannesburg is project [sic] of enormous scale and magnitude that is unprecedented not only in South Africa but on the African continent as well.”
The service provider continued to state that due to its sheer magnitude, it is inevitable that the implementation “of this project of this scale” would experience “teething issues”.
This is the explanation given to numerous Randburg residents who were billed thousands of Rands after the entity received faulty information from these meters, or calculated its own “estimations” on the new ‘smart’ meter readings.
“To date, City Power has deployed approximately 50 000 smart meters across the city,” the statement from the entity said.
“Of the 42 344 meters deployed, 30 344 are for domestic use. The total number of meters on the billing system is 28 100 or 89.21 per cent of the 30 344 domestic meters. This means that 89.21 per cent of domestic smart meter population have actual, accurate readings extracted from them.”
The statement continues to elaborate further by saying that the total number of exceptions, or meters with problems, is 2 244 or 7 per cent
referenced against the total domestic population of 30 344.
The 2 244 exceptions are broken down into three categories: premises where applications have been received to convert to prepayment mode (1 230), premises where meters have been tampered with (394) and premises where meters have been found to have communication problems (620).
“City Power still uses estimates for billing purposes on the remaining units that are yet to be integrated into the system. Despite the negligible number of faulty meters, City Power is not underrating the problem and has noted the concerns raised and is putting remedial measures in place to address these concerns.”
Due to the quality checkpoints and data integrity standards, there is a definite time lag between the instant of installing the meter and full system updates to allow for the correct bill.
City Power is reducing this time lag to a maximum of four weeks. These efforts will set aside all the challenges experienced on this project to date.
Details: Smart Meter Project call centre 087 022 0540; smartmetersupport@citypower.co.za
