New meters need to be installed in South Hills to avert outages
City Power appealed for residents’ co-operation in allowing their officials access to their properties during the implementation period.
The residents of South Hills recently contacted The Southern Courier to complain about the prolonged power outages.
Establishing the cause of the problem was done after investigations.
City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena said The Reuven Service Delivery Centre confirmed that the reference numbers for this query related to the residents in South Hill who refused to let the authorised metering team normalise their meters.
“According to our records, we have non-vending customers in Drusana Court, Olyfberg Court and Tornaka Court, in Southern Klipriviersberg Road, the corner of Outspan opposite Queenshaven in South Hills. The residents who do not have electricity refused to be normalised,” he said.
In addition, customers need to be informed that Section 23(1) of the Electricity Act 41 of 1987, read with Section 101 of the Local Government: Municipal Systems Act 32 of 2000 as well as Section 33(1) of the electricity by-laws:
“Should customers wilfully hinder, obstruct or interfere with any authorised representative of City Power in performing any duties, including but not limited to faulty meter replacement, they will be guilty of an offence.”
Mangena noted that their stakeholder engagement team engaged with councillors in the area to find contingency measures.
“This is to ensure we don’t leave any customers behind and to ensure the safety of our teams. The residents have since agreed to have our metering department install new meters. That will happen on June 6 and 7.”
In March, City Power embarked on a programme to replace obsolete, faulty, bypassed meters at no cost to customers ahead of the token identifiers (TID) rollover project.
The programme will also involve resetting the meters to be TID-compliant.
TID resetting entails replacing every non-smart (old technology) meter with new technology meters. These old meters will stop accepting the credit tokens by November of next year when the credit token will run out of available numbers.
City Power has rolled out this programme in phases to audit and normalise meters across the seven regions of the City of Joburg. Other areas will be visited in the coming months. They will notify customers of the dates in communications with their councillors and the local media.
The TID-compliance resetting will ensure the meters are not locked out come November 2024, when the digits used during the recharging of tokens will run out.
“While this will, for now, be free, we will, in future, disconnect any customer found to have tampered with the newly installed meters or refused to reset the meter for TID compliance. We will charge customers a reconnection fee and recovery for the period of the loss.
“In addition, the audits will assist City Power in cleaning up its data and ensuring unmetered customers, especially in non-affluent areas, have smart meters which will enable them to buy electricity and help City Power monitor and control the load as we battle load-shedding.
“We appeal to residents for co-operation and to allow our officials to gain access to their properties during the implementation of this task because these audits will be vital to prepare for the TID rollover because other meters cannot be reprogrammed,” he said.
