Kenya Power now engages NYS to collect meter details

A team of National Youth Service officers will begin Monday start knocking on your door, seeking to take details of your electricity connection.

It is the latest attempt by Kenya Power to tame electricity losses, a big proportion of which is due to theft by consumers.

The process will help the company capture, analyse, manage and store data on its transmission and distribution facilities by identify the meters in each Kenyan household and business premises to pinpoint where theft takes place.

“We started this process because of the pain we have gone through concerning the system losses, which have taken a lot of our resources. We have paid a lot of money to consultants to tell us what our losses are and have now said that is enough,” said Kenya Power chief executive Bernard Ngugi.

“We do not need research for that… (what) we need is to know where our meters are. We have data on transformers but we do not have data on meters and associating them with the transformers.” 

The house-to-house exercise is expected to help Kenya Power narrow system losses, which have risen to 23.46 per cent in the year to June 2020, partly to blame for the company’s poor financial performance.

Electricity losses, which in addition to theft are also due to transmission losses, have risen from 18.68 per cent to the current levels over seven years.

Ngugi said that after the data clean-up, the firm will undertake a transformer metering project, which will give insight on the amount of power leaving each transformer against what is paid for by the customer.

“If we meter a transformer, we can aggregate all the meters fed by that transformer and tell whether there is a loss and where we are losing,” he said, adding that this will be key in turning around Kenya Power.

“Once we deal with losses, we will be good to go.”