Customers with prepaid meters hit 1.67m in Q4’18-NBS
The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), has said that the total number of customers with prepaid meters in the country increased marginally to 1.67million customers in the fourth quarter of 2018 (Q4’18), up by barely one percent from 1.65million in Q3’18.
Prepaid meters The Bureau disclosed this in its release yesterday titled, “Power Sector Report: Energy Generated and Sent Out and Consumed and Load Allocation (Q4 2018)”.
The report stated that Abuja Disco has the highest number of customers metered, closely followed by Benin Disco and Eko Disco while Yola Disco recorded the least total number of customers metered.
Meanwhile, NBS says the power generation statistics for Q4’18 showed that a total average of 68,625 MegaWatts per hour, MWh, of energy was generated daily by thermal power stations, while hydro power stations generated an average of 27,913 MWh of energy within the same period. A
“Thermal stations generated a peak of 80,856 MWh on 20th December 2018 while the hydro stations attained a peak of 32,681 MWh on the 21st of October 2018.
“However, the lowest daily energy generation of 44,367 MWh was attained by thermal stations on 29th of October 2018 while the lowest daily energy generation of 21,457 MWh was attained by hydro stations on 21st of December 2018,” the report stated.
On the disadvatages of metering suystems, it was idebtified that absence of Vending Infrastructure is a major problem. The Distribution Utilities cited an absence or inadequate vending infrastructure as one of the major obstacles militating against the deployment of prepaid meters in their distribution companies. According to them, their metering plan was in stages and since some areas lacked the vending infrastructure, meters could not be deployed. Vending infrastructure, it was observed, simply comprises software built into a PPM Master Station which automatically allows for vending often on vouchers or on electronic media. Vending in itself was the capability of a point of sale device to generate the prepaid token and conclude the associated prepayment transaction. It is therefore strange to procure prepaid meters independent of a vending infrastructure.
