South Africa’s big IoT smart meter push

National Treasury recently awarded a transversal contract that allows municipalities to procure smart electricity and water meters, as well as other services, from seven different service providers.

Known as RT29, the contract comprises several categories municipalities can use. These include end-to-end smart metering, smart load management, and updating existing prepaid electricity meters so they will continue to work after 24 November 2024.

The seven bidders from which municipalities can procure services are African Metering Solutions, Blue Label subsidiary Cigicell, Conlog, Isandiso Pipelines & Engineering, Landis + Gyr, MTN, and Vodacom.

Treasury awarded the contract at the end of May and it is valid from 1 June to 31 May 2027. However, MyBroadband has learned that the smart metering project has yet to launch.

The technical specifications for the electricity smart meters state that service providers must handle the entire time-of-use tariff reading and billing process, as well as several kVA tariff and statistical meters.

Successful bidders will assume responsibility for the integrity of the metering installation, which includes the new meter and wiring but excludes current transformers, voltage transformers, fuses, and test blocks.

Software systems must be able to communicate securely with any electricity meter installed within the supply authority’s boundaries.

Meters must be programmable to record and report billing data for various tariff groups, and store the maximum average over 30 minutes of demand in kVA recorded during the billing period.

Smart meters must also be able to log energy exported from embedded generation systems, like home solar installations, and support the Standard Transfer Specification (STS) and Currency Standard Transfer Specification (CTS).

Service providers must also provide a mobile data connection for the electricity meters to communicate over.

Treasury provided similar specifications for smart water meters, which includes being made of durable ABS plastic that is protected against sunlight and corrosion.

The water meters must run on the Sigfox network, feature an embedded antenna, and have a lithium battery with an approximate life of 10 years.

All smart meters must be automatically monitored around the clock for irregular activities, and the system must trigger an alarm for any tampered meters.

A system-generated notification must be sent to the supply authority’s responsible personnel on any identified meter tamper alarm.

For municipalities to participate in the transversal contract, they must first apply to National Treasury using a prescribed form.

Municipalities must choose which parts of the transversal contract they need when lodging their application.

Once the application is filed, Treasury will hand it off to its Local Government Budget Analysis (LGBA) directorate.

The LGBA will evaluate the application by performing a budget analysis and considering affordability, cash flow, the municipality’s rollout plan, and value for money.

“Municipalities that are participating in the Debt Relief Programme and Smart Meter Grant Rollout will be invited to apply for the grant to fund their participation,” Treasury stated.

“They are not excluded from participating with their funding, providing they meet the transversal contract approval conditions.”

In addition to paving the way for municipalities to roll out smart water and electricity meters, RT29-2024 also hoped to help tackle the pressing issue of South Africa’s Key Revision Number (KRN) rollover programme.

Eskom and municipal electricity distributors are in a race against time to update a combined 11.53 million prepaid meters before 24 November 2024.

The update is necessary because all STS-compliant prepaid electricity meters worldwide will stop accepting voucher tokens unless they receive the codes required to update or “roll over” the KRN.

This is because of an anti-fraud system built into the meters that uses a token identifier (TID), which is essentially a timer that starts running on a specific date and time.

The TID is currently counting from 1 January 1993. Since it is a 24-bit field and each TID represents one minute, the timer will run out some time on 24 November 2024.

South Africa’s KRN/TID rollover programme started late, causing some concern that many prepaid meters will not be updated in time.

However, Blue Label co-CEO Brett Levy said the award of RT29 has helped.

“A lot of the rollover programme has been done remotely,” Levy said.

“The panic around the end-of-November-Y2K, as we call it, has died down a bit. As of now, it’s looking good. It’s looking like we’re going to meet it as a country.”