Challeneges of Electricity Industry in Nigeria - Metering and Estimated Billing

Electricity Metering

An electricity meter or energy meter is a device that measures the amount of electric energy consumed by a residence, a business, or an electrically powered machine. Electric utility companies use electric meters installed at customers' premises to measure electric energy delivered to their customers for billing purposes. It is calibrated in billing units, the most common one being the kilowatt hour [kWh].

There are two categories of meters used in Nigeria; they are based on the payment schemes - Pre-paid Meters and Post-paid Meters.  Each of these categories of exists as Single- Phase and Three-Phase meters, depending on consumption rate, consumers can be advised to use single-phase or three-phase meters.

Array of Post-paid Meters

With Post-paid meters, consumers pay for the energy consumed after consumption while with pre-paid meters, consumers purchase some units of energy prior to the consumption of the energy.

Advantages of pre-paid meters includes no-estimated billing, proper budgeting and planning of energy usage, and no disturbance from marketers of utility companies; however, on the downside, pre-paid meters needs to be monitored to avoid automatic disconnection during odd times. Post-paid meters can be advantageous as well if the consumer is energy consumption savvy; but it requires lots of follow-up and disturbances by marketers from utility companies.

Array of Pre-paid Meters

 Estimated Billing

In Nigeria, about 50%of electricity consumers are not metered. Some of these customers have made provision for the purchase of meters for more than a year, yet they are still on estimate.

What is estimated billing? Estimated billings are electricity bills that based on the availability of power supply, historical consumption and customer based within a supply feeder.  After the total consumption of the month is obtained, the energy consumed by the metered consumers are removed from the total, then the balance is shared amongst the unmetered consumers based on the availability of power supply, consumer population and other biases. This shared energy is usually high because there are a lot of rogue consumers on the network and there are technical losses on lines during distribution.

These rogue consumers do not exist in the billing records of the utility companies; consequently, the electricity consumed by the rogue consumers is shifted to the unmetered but billed consumers. Furthermore, the technical losses are usually not accounted for, the bulk of these losses are channelled to the consumers to pay – mostly, the unmetered consumers.

How can one guide against Estimated Billing?

1.       A genuine consumer should ensure proper registration with the utility company.

2.       The consumer should ensure an appropriate meter is installed.

3.       Consumers should monitor all reading of post-paid meters and ensure that the reading taken reflects on the bill.

4.       In a situation, a consumer notices estimated billing despite having a meter installed, the consumer should quickly contact the marketer involved or write to the Customer Service Manager of the utility company for immediate resolution.