The Millennium Development Authority (MiDA) has received equipment for a modern Meter Management System (MMS) being set up for the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), which is expected to help the struggling electricity distributor improve its revenue mobilisation.
The equipment is expected to be inaugurated in the last quarter of this year, and will boost ECG’s revenue collection by enabling customers connected to the system to buy pre-paid credit in real-time anywhere in the country, along with other state-of-the-art functions.
The system worth US$12million was procured with funds from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), an Agency of the United States government, under the Ghana Power Compact programme.
It is part of a project, ‘Ghana Power Compact’s Reduction in Commercial Losses and Improvement of Revenue Collection Rates Activity’, designed to integrate ECG’s smart pre-paid metering platforms and enhance customer experience. The equipment’s delivery is the project’s latest phase.
Among other things the Meter Management System will have full redundancy – a primary site and a disaster recovery site – with online real-time backup capability.
“The days when customers could not buy pre-paid credit because a Pre-paid Server had failed will soon be behind ECG,” MiDA said in a statement.
The equipment, comprising of 17 servers in 6 racks, 40 point-of-sale devices, UPSs, laptops and printers, among others, have been delivered to two sites – the ECG Project Office and ECG Legon District Office.
“The system will contribute significantly to improving ECG’s revenue mobilisation efforts and give customers greater flexibility in paying for electricity, as it will enable them to buy any amount of pre-paid credit even when they have travelled outside their regions,” it further read.
It added that the software needed for a fully functioning Meter Management System was installed and tested prior to shipping the equipment to Ghana. “ECG and MiDA’s Consultants took part in the Factory Acceptance Tests, and have certified the System to be compliant with all the specifications. Starting this week, Messrs Siemens SA, the Contractor, will reassemble the System and commence Operational Acceptance Testing immediately. The System is expected to be operational in the beginning of the fourth quarter of this year.”
The MMS Project is part of all the activities being implemented under the Ghana Power Compact’s Reduction in Commercial Losses and Improvement of Revenue Collection Rates Activity – a component of the broader ECG Financial and Operational Turnaround (EFOT) Project.
Other activities under the project are: modernising utility operations activity; technical loss reduction activity; and outage-reduction activity. Together, it is hoped that they will help to boost customer experience and ECG’s financial and operational strength.
