The Greater Accra regional office of the PURC through its regular monitoring exercises noticed that, in the month of February, 2024, several consumers of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) in Accra East and Tema regions, complained about power supply disruptions and negative balances on their prepaid meters.
The Regional office of the Commission visited the affected areas to ascertain the magnitude of the situation and subsequently organized a stakeholder engagement with ECG and the affected consumers.
This was to assist the commission understand the issues, and to help resolve the complaints or take appropriate regulatory actions.
The investigative team ascertained that, ECG has a NURI network of meters for some of its customers mainly within the Accra East and Tema Regions.
These NURI network of meters have both the prepaid and the post-paid mode functions, thus, when the pre-paid mode fails the meter automatically switches to the post-paid mode.
The District Managers of ECG in the affected communities, explained that, the negative balances experienced, only affected consumers who use the NURI network (meters) and that, the negative balance situation was mostly due to failure in communication between the NURI network infrastructure, the meter, the Data Concentration Unit (DCU), and the Server.
The District Managers further indicated that, the NURI network meters have modems installed in them, which store energy consumed by the consumer and other information.
This information, is then communicated from the DCU to the Server for billing purposes with the aid of internet data on the SIM cards.
The affected areas under the Accra East Region of ECG were Roman Ridge, Legon, and Adentan.
It was detected that, the recent major system update on the NURI network (meter), caused some meters to reflect a negative balance on their accounts.
This error occurred as a result of defective modems in the affected meters, which led to a communication failure.
The timely intervention of the PURC, brought relief to some consumers who had negative balances on their accounts.
Most of these consumers were made to offset the negative balances that occurred on their meters and power was subsequently restored without hesitation.
The Commission recommended that the District Managers in Accra East of ECG should ensure regular updates on the NURI network and communicate regularly with their cherished customers.
Source: PURC