Erongo Red's Chief Executive Officer has urged customers to update their pre-paid metres to the new token identifier so that they are not left behind before it is implemented in November. Immanuel !Hanabeb announced this at a media briefing in Walvis Bay.
This announcement comes after all electrical suppliers received directives from the Standard Transfer Specification (STS) Association regarding the changes that will come into effect on November 24, 2024. The changes will affect not only the metres with Erongo RED but all STS-compliant metres all over the world.
!Hanabeb says Erongo Red immediately took action and put into motion measures to ensure that, come the implementation deadline, they will be STS compliant.
He says they have upgraded their vending system software to incorporate the new STS6 standard. This will allow the metres to accept new tokens bought on November 24, 2024.
The purpose of the TID, he says, is to ensure that the same token cannot be reused.
On November 24, 2024, the metres will not be able to accept current token numbers because, by then, the TID would have reached its limit of identifying unique token numbers, he says.
"When consumers buy electricity at our office, online, or via vendors, they would normally get a receipt that has 20-digit numbers. Thus, customers will enter that unique number into a metre, and the metre gets credited with units. The token number is encoded with a unique Token ID. Every time a consumer buys electricity, the metre will store the Token ID in its memory. All pre-payment metres have a Token Identifier (TID) within the metre to identify every token."
He appealed to all prepaid metre users to visit the Erongo RED Office to claim their Key Change Codes so that they can activate their metres and avoid inconvenience.
"Currently, Erongo RED has over 39,416 prepaid metres. All these metres need to be updated so that the customers are able to consume electricity after November 24, 2024. Since mid-May, we have upgraded over 7,409 metres, mostly in Omaruru, Karibib, Okombahe, Usakos, Uis, Omatjete, and surrounding villages and settlement areas. We are almost closer to finishing these areas. This represents about 19% of the metre completed."
He further urged the community to cooperate with their consultants when visiting their homes.
"We started with smaller areas so that, once we are done with those areas, maximum resources and time can be deployed in two major towns (Walvis Bay, 37%, and Swakopmund, 33%). For the next 12 months, the focus will be to update the metres in Walvisbay, Swakopmund, Henties, and Arandis, where only 5% of the metres have been updated to date. Thus, there are still quite a lot of metres that we need to update, and we would like to urge the community to please cooperate with our employees or consultants when they visit their homes."