Illustration of Johannesburg's electricity network with an orange-toned background, featuring smart electricity meters, a lightning bolt across the image, the City Power Johannesburg logo, and a black silhouette of the Johannesburg skyline in the foreground. The image symbolises electricity supply, power infrastructure, energy monitoring, and urban power distribution.

City Power’s electricity theft crackdown faces data problem

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City Power’s R3.96 billion in non-technical electricity losses is the target of a tender for near-real-time monitoring of prepaid purchases, but experts warn analytics will flag suspects, not recover money.

According to City Power’s latest annual report, the 2024/25 figure was up from R3.45 billion the previous year. It accounted for 20.85% of electricity purchased and included theft, illegal connections, meter bypassing, faulty equipment and billing errors.

Jacqui Muller, a researcher at Belgium Campus iTversity and a PhD candidate in computer science and information technology, warns that the proposed monitoring capabilities depend on the type of electricity meters installed.

“Standard prepaid meters are essentially one-way. You see the token sale, not the consumption,” Muller says. Near-real-time monitoring needs smart meters with reliable communications, a system that can take in interval readings, and clean links between the vending, billing, meter and GIS systems, she adds.

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