The community of Emalahleni Local Municipality is hereby informed of the following:
STANDARD TRANSFER SPECIFICATION (STS) REFERS TO:
The Standard Transfer Specification is the global standard for the transfer of electricity and other pre-payment tokens, which is a secured message system for carrying information between a point of sale and an electrical pre-paid meter, and is currently finding wide application in the electricity metering and payment system.
WHAT IS THE PROJECT ABOUT?
All electrical pre-payment meters based on STS technology will stop dispensing electricity on 24 November 2024, thus presenting a significant risk to service levels, sales and revenue collection of all municipalities to end user customers in the electricity business.
All pre-payment customers to note the following;
- the meter will stop accepting new credit tokens, and will then stop dispensing electricity after the existing credit is used up;
- Any token generated after this date which utilises the 24-digit Token Identifier (TID), calculated on the current system, will be rejected by the meters as being old tokens as the TID value encoded in the token will have reset back to 0.
THE WAY FORWARD:
The technical remedy is to reset each pre-payment meter by means of entering 2 special tokens before November 2024, in order for each meter to be compliant and customers not to be inconvenienced by not being able to purchase electricity.
The municipality will be embarking on a project with the assistance from communities to ensure the successful implementation of the project in a phased approach, which commenced on 1 March 2020. The details regarding the affected areas and process will be communicated on a regular basis.
