Managing Director Ben Chumo confirmed that the initiative is also aimed at eliminating corruption which for a long time has denied the company huge sums in revenue.

 

“Our focus as a company is to ensure meter reading and billing is professionally done,” he said in an interview in his Stima Plaza office.

 

For a long time, Mr Chumo added, the company has been faced with graft where some personnel conspire with customers to siphon money from the company.

 

The activity, he said, would be sub-contracted to a reputable global manufacturing company, adding that the tendering process would start soon. “Once the process is outsourced, the more than 600 meter readers will be deployed to other activities within the company to enhance production.

The sub-contracting, he added, is part of a new approach to modernise installation of power meters at customers’ premises to prevent electricity theft and to introduce e-payment to ease long queues of customers in banking halls.

 

As part of enhancing customers’ service, Chumo stated that the company is fast-tracking bold strategies as enshrined in the bigger power master plan. “Going forward our focus is to ensure customers enjoy uninterrupted power supply, guaranteeing accurate billing, ease of availability of new connections, rapid response to consumer grievances and assuring safety,” he stated.

The company has been installing pre-paid meters over and above the original meters for small-scale power consumers. The old generation of meters have to be read by deployed personnel and thus customers are billed at the end of month.

 

Chumo said the company has also been connecting large-scale power users with automatic metering and soon will be upgraded with outdoor meters. He explained that Kenya Power collects 80 per cent of its revenue from 5,000 large-scale customers who are connected with automatic meters.

 

He said the remaining 20 per cent of income is earned from users of pre-paid meters currently standing at 700,000 and 2.2 million consumers using first generation of power meters. To prevent electricity theft, Chumo disclosed, the company would install outdoor metering to replace automatic meters near the premises of the big power consumers.

 

“These type of meters will be put to high poles located near large scale consumers. In this way we expect to prevent power theft and general tampering of the gadgets,” he added. Chumo said the smart metering to be procured will be connected at a cost of Sh3.2 billion starting with Nairobi.

 

Source : energy mix report