Why Kenya Power sometimes estimates your electricity bills

Kenya Power General Manager for Commercial Services and Sales, Eng. Rosemary Oduor, has disclosed that the company indeed makes estimations for consumer electricity bills every so often.

Eng. Oduor made the revelation on Citizen TV’S ‘The Big Conversation’ show on Thursday night, in response to a query on why consumers sometimes receive distinctly varying bills month-on-month.

The query was raised by Wycliff Omiti, the Programs Manager at the Kenya Alliance of Resident Associations (KARA), who wondered about inaccurate billings in instances where a consumer spends Ksh.2,000 worth of electricity on a slow month but is slapped with a Ksh.20,000 bill simply because they spent that same amount on a relatively busier period the previous month.

According to Eng. Oduor, Kenya Power indeed makes electricity bill estimations in instances where their staff are unable to obtain accurate meter readings from the consumers’ premises.

She noted that such instances include denial of access to the electricity meters by the consumers themselves, either maliciously or just by accident.

“Bill estimation is usually a last resort when we’re unable to get a reading from the client. Some of the reasons that make us not get readings is denial of access to the premise; some times intentionally, many times not intentionally,” she noted.

“A lot of our people lock up their premises and got to work and we’re unable to access the meters. Some of them for long periods, and therefore when we finally are able to get access, there’s an accumulated consumption.”

The Kenya Power GM went ahead to list a raft of solutions that the company has come up with to eliminate the concern of electricity bill estimations in the future.

This includes introducing a system that enables consumers to read their own meters and send the readings to Kenya Power when prompted, or developing a smart system that communicates the meter readings directly to the power distributor.

“We have introduced self-reading; you register as a self-reader, when your reading is due, we give you an SMS prompt, you take a reading of your meter and send it to us and we’re able to do the billing based on that,” stated Eng. Oduor.

“Long term, we’re now introducing smart meters that communicate with us and we communicate with them; they’re able to give us the reading digitally, and therefore that will help us better be able to bill our customers with actual readings and without frequent estimation.”

She further added that: “We continue to encourage our customers to give access to our meter readers so that they’re able to access the meter and get the reading.”