The Madibeng municipality, along with all other municipalities in the country have only until November 2024 to update prepaid electricity meters when they will stop working.

Prepaid electricity meters are due to stop accepting new tokens after 24 November 2024, unless they are updated through a process called Token Identifier (TID) rollover. The TID is referenced to a base date of 1993 and will run out of range in 2024, thus causing the prepaid meter to stop accepting tokens.
Electricity suppliers, Eskom and municipalities must execute a relatively simple update project to avoid the issue. However, the project will take time.
The municipality said this week it had 32 875 registered prepaid consumers and 4 700 meters had been replaced. This correlates with the South African Government Association (SALGA) dashboard for the project, according to which Madibeng has so far only reset 4 200 (or 14%) of its estimated 30 000 meters. Municipalities submit their progress data to a dashboard on the Salga website.
“They are categorised as 30 000 domestic prepaid, 1 200 domestic credit meters, 1 200 commercial, 110 manufacturing and industrial and 365 others. Madibeng is completely replacing old Conlog prepaid and old clock domestic credit meters with new split meters, tackling revenue at the same time. Once the replacement is done, migration from STS 1 to STS 2 will be done,” municipal spokesperson Tumelo Tshabalala said.
Replacement of meters has already started in Sunway, Refentse, Schoemansville, Brits and Elandsrand. “The municipality will communicate with customers in time to alert them that they will receive two separate recharge pins to punch in. For indigent customers we will do door-to-door punching,” Tshabalala said.
The estimated completion date is June 2024.