The equipment
THE MILLENNIUM Development Authority (MiDA) has received equipment for a modern metre management system (MMS) that is being set up for the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG).
The delivery of the equipment is the latest phase of a project designed to integrate ECG’s smart pre-paid metering platforms and enhance customer experience.
When the equipment is commissioned later this year, ECG’s customers connected to the system will be able to buy pre-paid credits anywhere in the country and be credited in real time.
The system, worth US$12 million, has been procured with funds provided by the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), an agency of the United States Government, under the Ghana Power Compact Program. The MMS will have full redundancy—a primary site and a disaster recovery site—with an online real time backup capability.
The days when customers could not buy pre-paid credit because a pre-paid server had failed would soon be behind ECG.
The equipment, comprising 17 servers in six racks, 40 point-of-sale devices, UPSs, laptops, printers, etc. have been delivered to two sites – the ECG Project Office and the ECG Legon District Office.
The system will contribute significantly to improving ECG’s revenue mobilization efforts and will give customers greater flexibility in paying for electricity, as it will enable customers to buy any amount of pre-paid credit even when they have travelled outside their regions.
The software needed for a fully functioning MMS 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
Modernizing Utility Operations Activity; Technical Loss Reduction Activity; and Outage Reduction Activity. Together, these will help to boost customer experience and ECG’s financial and operational strength.