The Impact of Smart Prepaid Metering on Non-Technical Losses in Ghana

Gideon Otchere-Appiah, Shingo Takahashi, Mavis Serwaa Yeboah and Yuichiro Yoshida
Additional contact information
Gideon Otchere-Appiah: Engineering Services Department, Northern Electricity Distribution Company, P.O. Box TL 77 Tamale, Ghana
Shingo Takahashi: Department of Development Policy, Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation, Division of Development Science, Hiroshima University, Higashihiroshima 739-8511, Japan
Mavis Serwaa Yeboah: Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Applied Science and Technology, Sunyani Technical University, P.O. Box 206 Sunyani, Ghana

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 7, 1-16

Abstract: The high incidence of electricity theft, meter tampering, meter bypassing, reading errors, and defective and aged meters, among others, increases utility losses, especially non-technical losses (NTL). A utility in Ghana piloted a non-technical loss reduction program in 2019 to replace postpaid meters with anti-tamper, anti-fraud, and anti-theft smart prepaid meters. By using customer-level residential billing panel data from 2018 to 2019 obtained from the utility, we assess the effectiveness of this program using the difference-in-differences fixed-effect approach. On average, the results indicated that the reported amount of customers’ monthly electricity consumption increases by 13.2% when any tampered postpaid meter is replaced with a smart prepaid meter, indicating the NTLs by customers. We further employed quantile difference-in-differences regression and observed that reported energy consumption has increased for all households except those at the lower quantile (25th quantile). We conclude that smart prepaid metering could be a remedy to reduce NTLs for the electricity distribution sector in areas where electricity theft is rampant.

Keywords: smart meters; electricity theft; non-technical losses; difference-in-differences; quantile regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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