BREAKING NEWS, Power
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Ikeja Electric will complete its first phase of prepaid meter installation to 300,000 customers in 2016
| By Anayo Ezugwu | Dec 21, 2015 @ 01:00 GMT |
THE Ikeja Electric is to complete its ongoing installation of prepaid meters under the first phase of the company’s metering programme to 300,000 customers by 2016. Abiodun Ajifowobaje chief executive officer, Ikeja Electric, at a special session on metering at the recently-concluded West African Power Industry Convention, WAPIC, in Lagos, stated that 10,000 smart meters are currently being installed monthly, under the programme, which kicked off in October. By January 2016, the monthly installation would hit 15,000 smart meters.
He stated that the result of the customer enumeration conducted by the company showed that 300,000 customers do not have functional meters. According to him, the company has installed about 21,000 meters since the first phase started, stressing that customers are not required to pay for the meters.
The company had drawn a time-table on how to install the meters based on location by location and called on the customers within the company’s network to wait for the turn of their respective locations to get the meters without paying a kobo. After the installation of the 300,000 meters, the company will also target to add new 500,000 customers to its network under the second phase of the metering programme.
“Our greatest challenge is in giving customers estimated billing. We know that we cannot give steady power supply 24/7 and Nigerians have accepted it. But what they are saying is that if you give them three hours of supply; let them pay for three hours of supply and not estimation. That is the greatest challenge facing all the distribution companies.
“So, we have put in place what I call a very robust metering programme. Now, we are installing about 10,000 meters monthly. But we are saying that if you cannot wait for your turn, you can come and we will provide you with meter under the Credited Advanced Payment for Metering Implementation, CAPMI, scheme,” he said.
Ajifowobaje insisted that the only way to reduce the losses suffered by the distribution companies is through effective metering. “We doing metering system called Automatic Metering Infrastructure, AMI, but there is no way you can be automatic without being digital. To complement that is the Customer Enumeration, Technical Audit and Asset Mapping, CETAAM, which we are doing. What we are doing is energy data. By the time we collate those data, we marry it to our AMI infrastructure to produce a robust system that is digitally backed to ensure that we give our customers efficient services. I mean, we have gone beyond all those manual ways of doing things.”
Ajifowobaje said with the installation of smart meters, the company would be able to read and disconnect meters remotely, adding that this reduces the day-to-day utility operational cost of the company. He also stated that smart meters will give customers all the relevant information on tariff and allow them to manage their energy use better, thus helping customers to save money.
CAPMI is a special programme initiated by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, that allows willing electricity customers to make payment to distribution companies for prepaid meters and such payment is then refunded back to the customer through deductions from the monthly electricity bills.
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