The Electricity Control Board (ECB) has ordered all licensees to submit monthly projects for monitoring and evaluation after concerns about the slow progress of the token identifier roll-over project.
ECB Chief Executive Officer Robert Kahimise also ordered all licensees to ensure such is completed latest by July next year.
He implored all licensees to make emergency budgetary provisions to execute the token identifier (TID) roll-over project as per the TID roll-over plan.
The developments come as only 13.4% of the total of 321,278 electricity metre boxes that need to be upgraded under the programme have been attended to.
TID is a 24-bit field contained in a Standard Identification Specifications (STS) compliance token for the electricity prepayment meter that identifies the date and time of the token generation.
The TID is used to determine if an STS token has already been used in a prepayment meter. After a certain period of time (30 years), the TID in the token will reset back to zero, hence the need for an upgrade.
The TID roll-over project involves entering two TID tokens by the distribution licensee or its representative to update the customer prepayment meter from Key Revision 1 (KRN1) to Key Revision 2 (KRN2) and does not have any impact on the end consumer tariff and prepayment meter accuracy.
“This is concerning progress for the ECB as over 86% of prepaid meters still have to be rolled over, with less than a year remaining to the hard TID cut-off date of 24 November 2024. Therefore, to avert the imminent crisis, all licensees are required to complete the TID roll-over project on or before 31 July 2024, leaving an additional four months leading to 24 November 2024, to address any challenges to be encountered,” Kahimise said.
All prepayment meter users who are not rolled over after the set deadline will not be able to purchase electricity.
“After prior engagement with all the Electricity Distribution Industry (EDI) licensees, the ECB hosted a targeted workshop with all 29 distribution licensees on the 3rd November 2023 to assess overall industry progress. There are 321,278 meters for the entire Namibian EDI that are affected by the TID project. Overall, the number of metres rolled over as reported at the meeting by the licensee present is 43,146 representing 13.4% progress with 278,132 meters that still need to be rolled over,” said Kahimise.
The ECB thus encouraged all prepaid electricity customers to cooperate with their respective distribution licensees, by granting them access to the prepayment meters, to enable them to complete the TID roll-over project as per the set deadline.
