There are approximately 7 million prepaid meters in South Africa that need to be reset before November 2024, because the system running credit tokens will run out of numbers at this time and all existing meters will stop accepting credit tokens.
The Standard Transmission Specifications Association (STSA), the South African metrology industry body, has started an awareness program to notify the utility company to upgrade its vending system to STS600 and visit every meter in its area by November to clear the memory And change the instrument key to 2024.
STS Association Director Don Taylor explained: “The token identifier (TID) is calculated as the number of minutes from the base date defined in 1993 to the creation of the token. The TID has a limited range and will be used up in November 2024. All existing prepaid meters will stop accepting credit tokens. In order to circumvent this problem, the memory of each meter needs to clear all stored TIDs, and its encryption key needs to be changed before 2024.”
The new TID range will start from the new base date in 2014 and end in 2045, thereby extending the life of the instrument. “In order to achieve this critical change,” Mr. Taylor explained, “every meter must be personally visited, which can be performed by a full-time utility employee or an end customer.”
“Therefore, there is a six-year window period,” he continued, “the utility company must complete the plan within this period. Because we are worried that the utility company may be too late, we are embarking on an improvement Get to know the plan, reach out to all STS users and provide a platform to provide users with technical support and guidance during the implementation of the TID rotation plan. We aim to build a website for this purpose so that users can interact by discussing issues. In addition, We are using media channels and conference activities to communicate with users to raise awareness of the TID rollover in 2024. The plan is managed by a specially authorized task team.”
STS Association estimates that South Africa currently has about 7 million prepaid meters installed, and it may still grow to about 8 million by 2024.
Don Taylor added: “We estimate that there are currently about 50 million meters installed worldwide and will definitely be affected by rollovers. If the utility company is proactive enough, all newly installed meters can be produced on the new base date in 2014, thus avoiding These newly installed meters will have events in 2024. From now to 2024, it is likely that a total of about 70 million meters will be affected.”
STS was created in South Africa in 1993 as an industry standard to support “Electricity for All” mission and its electrification plan, which uses prepaid metering technology to connect 10 million homes to the grid. The STS Association was established in 1997 and became the custodian of STS. Subsequently, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) published it as IEC62055-41 and IEC62055-51 as an open international standard for prepaid electricity meters.
There are currently about 170 members from 36 countries, and almost all of them are manufacturing products that meet STS standards. Holley Technology Ltd. can provide customers STS standards meters.
Post time: Sep-02-2021