The concept of metered and prepaid electricity may be a near reality as the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) has started an equipment test bed in Spanish Wells, Eleuthera. Prepaid metering allows customers to better manage their electricity-use and bills via BTC’s 4G LTE data network.
BTC CEO Leon Williams said, “Prepaid metering is just one of the many examples of the “internet of things”. We are continuing to make the transformation to where our customers are.” It shows how we can use our advanced network to provide more convenience to the public. We are aware that there are hundreds of Bahamians with no electricity. By using a smart grid prepaid meter, customers can top up their account and monitor their usage. The system can even be designed to allow you to incrementally pay on your existing electricity bill. It will be a win/win situation for the electricity provider and the customer. We have been working with St. George’s Cay Power Limited on this ‘proof of concept’, (POC).”
CEO at St. George’s Cay Power Limited said, “We have been using the BTC prepaid metering solution for about a month now, and so far everything is going well. We have two meters that we are testing. In Spanish Wells we have several business owners that operate rental units. Prepaid metering will be beneficial to these customers as renters will be responsible for their power usage. I’m certain that it will also be beneficial for persons that may have problems paying for electricity.”…
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Solving the offline prepaid meter purchase problem
Africans are an innovative bunch…
- Load shedding: install Solar Power
- Electricity vending: prepaid from shops or online
- Online prepaid account down: no problem Power.Plus will keep trying even after you close your browser or App.
This local innovation seems to have come about from the vagaries of the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority – it appears to go offline at the most critical times when people are attempting to buy prepaid electricity after waiting in a long queue. It’s not uncommon to hop from one shop to another when ZESA the system or some it’s super agents (Agribank, CBZ, Netone, ZB Bank etc) are offline.
Power.Plus solves the problem elegantly:
- You register an account with them and add your ZESA meter number.
- When you buy electricity, Power.Plus tries to complete the transaction immediately.
- If it finds the ZESA system is down, it notifies you, queues the transaction and keeps trying at regular intervals in the background.
- In the meantime you can close the site and go do other things.
- Eventually when the ZESA systems comes online and Power.Plus completes the transactions, it sends the recharge token number via SMS.
Government employees could pay for own electricity consumption
The State government of Telangana in South India is seeking to curb the ‘wastage’ of electricity by Government employees by installing pre-paid electricity meters. Any usage over a stipulated maximum will have to be ‘topped up’ by employees. Telangana is one of the 29 states in India and was formed on 2 June 2014 with the city of Hyderabad as its capital.
The New Indian Express reports:
To minimise power usage and also curb wastage, state government has decided to introduce pre-paid electricity meters in government offices. Like mobile phone recharge cards, these meters will be fixed with certain amount of power based on the estimates by officials. This will ensure that the employees do not consume power over the stipulated limit.
The pre-paid energy meter has a mobile SIM-card like feature and as per the procedure, offices will have to recharge their power voucher every month. If any office fails to recharge its voucher, an SMS will be sent to the linked mobile number of Electricity department officer and power gets disconnected automatically.
If the power ‘allotted’ to a particular office or premises gets used up well before the 30-day time limit, the staff will be held responsible and they have to incur additional power bill on their own.
“This will inculcate a sense of fear of paying for the electricity bill from their pockets and the staff will put efforts to save power,” an electricity department official said.
Source: Pre-paid Meters in Telangana Government Offices – The New Indian Express
Pre-paid meters for sectional tile schemes
Writing for the Paddocks Press Newsletter, Anton Kelly says the following about the installation of pre-paid electricity meters in Sectional Title Complexes:
One of the major financial problems encountered by many sectional titles schemes these days is the recovery of services costs. Quite simply, owners and tenants just don’t pay their electricity and water bills. The problem that schemes encounter is that widespread non-payment can lead to huge outstanding accounts that can only be paid by raising a special levy, which is equally likely to be difficult to recover, and in any case would prejudice owners and tenants who have paid their service bills.
Sectional title schemes contract with the local municipality for the supply of water and with the municipality or Eskom for electricity. The scheme then charges each owner for the service, usually based on readings from individual meters but in older schemes without separate meters, according to the participation quota. Newer schemes, particularly in Cape Town, where a policy for their installation in new residential applications has been implemented since 2006, have pre-paid electricity meters installed when they are built. The problem does not exist in these schemes.
Schemes are not entitled to cut off services for non-payment of bills because the scheme is not the supplier. Only the service supplier – the local municipality or Eskom – is entitled to cut off the supply. The seemingly obvious answer to the problem is to install pre-paid electricity and water meters for each section.
There are now many private suppliers of prepaid meters aside from local municipalities like Port Elizabeth. They contract with schemes that have bulk meters, install the pre-paid meters, and the end users pay a rental for them. They buy tokens from a designated supplier, the third party vendor. The third party vendor provides and maintains the prepayment facilities and software and passes on the money collected from the end users, less a service fee of course, to the body corporate. The body corporate then pays the municipal bill for the bulk supply. The 6kl of free water the scheme gets from the local municipality for each household is pre-programmed into each meter.
Having prepaid meters for the supply of water and electricity seems the obvious answer to the problem of non-payment but there are various areas of difficulty to this solution.
Authority
Prescribed management rule 33(3) entitles owners in a sectional title scheme to require the trustees to install separate meters to measure each section’s consumption of electricity, water and gas. Only a simple majority of owners is required but the request must be made in writing. The trustees are not entitled to make this decision by themselves. However, this provision pre-supposes that the separate metering is internal and that the service is supplied in bulk to the scheme by the municipality or Eskom and the meters will be used by the body corporate to establish a charge for services actually used by each owner. It does not apply to the installation of pre-paid meters.
Because owners have bought their units in a scheme with an existing system for charging for services, changing that system would be a fundamental change to the nature of the scheme and our view is that all owners would have to agree to this change. An additional problem is tenants, who have contracted to lease premises under certain service payment conditions and they would have to agree to that change before a landlord could make it. Owners with tenanted sections would probably only be able to install prepaid meters between tenancies or with the written agreement of their tenants.
Practicality
Both Cape Town City and the Gauteng prepaid meter suppliers consulted during the preparation of this article say that, although it is possible in theory to provide prepaid meters to only some of the sections in a scheme, it is not practicable. This means that the whole scheme would have to be converted. Most schemes require extensive rewiring and re-plumbing for the installation of separate meters.
Cost
There are two areas of cost that have to be considered, the installation and rental cost, and the service fee charged by the third party vendors.
The installation of the meters is likely to be a major cost due to the rewiring and re-plumbing. The scheme would have to pay these costs directly, whether the local municipality or a private supplier installs the meters. Consumers usually have to buy the meters from the municipality’s supplier but private suppliers usually charge a rental for the meters.
Constitutional right to access to water
Where electricity and water are supplied though pre-paid meters, it is up to the end user to feed that meter, otherwise the service is automatically cut off. In the case of water meters, this is contrary to the provision of the Constitution that states that everyone has a right to access to water, which is necessary for life. In order to comply with this requirement, schemes would have to supply a reasonably accessible source of water on the premises.
There’s no doubt that prepaid metering will eventually become the norm but for the near future bodies corporate should concentrate on establishing a culture of payment for services among its members. The Sectional Titles Act and rules provide for the body corporate to use the courts or arbitration to recover arrears. Although initially expensive, perhaps a zealous application of these methods would help establish the necessary culture of prompt payment.
Article reference: 2013 Paddocks Press: Volume 8, Issue 8, Page 3
Source: Pre-paid meters in sectional tile schemes | Paddocks
Smart Meter rollout in Britain
Millions of energy users in Britain are about to get a new metering system – smart meters – technology which has been rejected by Germany and found not to be cost-effective by other nations.
Smart meters send information on energy usage directly back to the energy supplier, which eliminates the need for meter readings.
Crucially, they also let the customer know just how much electricity or gas they are consuming during the day. This revelation is expected to change our behaviour, so that we switch off lights, turn down heating, and generally use less energy.
The so-called big six energy suppliers are hoping to introduce a new kind of pricing to go with smart meters, a system used elsewhere in the world called time of use tariffs.
Smart meters are not compulsory, although the publicity campaigns do not give that fact much prominence. The energy companies are footing the bill for installing smart meters, but they acknowledge they will pass costs on to the customer…
Full Article: Will smart meters be worth the money? – BBC News