MiDA acquires $12-million equipment to improve ECG’s revenue drive

The Millennium Development Authority (MiDA) has acquired a $12-million equipment that will help improve the revenue mobilisation drive of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG).

The equipment, which comprises 17 servers in six racks, 40 point-of-sale devices, uninterruptable power supply (UPS) systems, laptops and printers, will integrate the ECG’s smart prepaid metering platforms (mobile application) which was rolled out at the beginning of this year.

After the installation and commissioning of the equipment, which has already been delivered to two sites at the ECG Project Office and its Legon District Office, both in Accra, customers of the company will experience greater flexibility in the payment of bills, irrespective of location.

The commissioning of the equipment is scheduled to take place later this year.

Significance

Speaking with the Daily Graphic, the Chief Operating Officer of MiDA, Mr Julius Kpekpena, said the installation of the equipment would prevent incidents of prepaid server breakdowns or failures, which sometimes made it impossible for customers to top up or recharge their prepaid meters.

"The days when customers could not buy prepaid credit because a prepaid server had failed will soon be behind the ECG. The new system has a primary site and a disaster recovery site, with an online real time back-up capability that will ensure that there is no server failure," he added.

According to him, it would enable customers of the ECG to purchase power even outside their regions of abode.

Statement

MiDA, in a statement issued last Wednesday, announced that it had taken delivery of the equipment.

It said the software needed for a fully functioning ECG meter management system was installed and tested prior to the shipment of the equipment to the country.

Subsequently, it said, consultants of the ECG and MiDA took part in the factory acceptance tests of the equipment and were satisfied that the system was compliant with all the specifications needed to make meter management effective and efficient.

A contractor, Messrs Siemens SA, is scheduled to reassemble the equipment and commence operational acceptance testing before the end of this week, as the system was expected to be operational in the beginning of October 2020.

According to MiDA, the meter management system project was part of a Ghana Power Compact agreement aimed at ensuring a reduction in commercial losses, improvement in revenue collection and a component of a broader ECG financial and operational turnaround (EFOT) project.

Other activities under the project are the modernisation of utility operations and technical loss and outage reduction to help boost customer experience and ECG’s financial and operational strength.