Locked out of classroom, locked out of tech
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.
The report also shows City Power has already introduced automated meter management, targeted audits and customer database reconciliation to address non-technical losses.
City Power reported auditing 40 000 customers who had converted to prepaid electricity but were not purchasing tokens. At the end of June 2025, prepaid customers represented approximately 74% of its customer base of 396 461 but accounted for just 11% of revenue.
Tender mercies
According to June 2026 technical specifications for a tender advertised this month, City Power wants a platform to monitor prepaid electricity purchases in near-real-time.
The tender covers third-party prepaid vending, revenue enhancement, customer monitoring, meter audits and advanced metering infrastructure support, and successful bidders must integrate their technology into City Power’s existing systems.
The documents also require that the appointed providers maintain 99.5% system availability. All customer and transaction data will remain City Power’s property, the document states.
City Power says bidders must be able to identify revenue leakage, suspected theft, meter tampering, illegal connections, bypass conditions and other non-technical losses. Service providers must also identify customers with abnormal behaviour, such as low purchases, zero vending, declining consumption or irregular vending patterns, and recommend interventions.
Bidders may propose artificial intelligence (AI) for anomaly detection, theft prediction, revenue forecasting, predictive maintenance and customer risk scoring. However, City Power requires AI outputs to be transparent, explainable, auditable and compliant with the Protection of Personal Information Act, with human decision-making retained.
One-way traffic
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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