EUCL postpones upgrade of prepaid power purchase system

The Energy Utility Corporation Limited (EUCL) has announced it has postponed its earlier plan to upgrade its prepaid system commonly known as cash power after it caused uproar among its customers.

The company had on Friday April 29th announced that the prepaid system will be temporary off beginning May 4, for two weeks during night hours to enable the second upgrade of the system.

“But it’s evident that our customers did not get it(announcement) in that sense, they thought they were going to spend two week without purchasing electricity,” said Maj. Eng Jean Claude Kalisa, Managing Director of the company on Wednesday.

The announcement saw most people queuing on agent points across the country yesterday to   purchase electricity before the switch off which prompted the company to reverse its decision.

“This system upgrade has been postponed to enable EUCL to further explain to the general public the details of this upgrade and how it will affect the normal electricity purchasing schedules,” Kalisa further explained.

The system is the only gateway to purchase electricity by customers in the country implying that halting of the system would mean people using electricity from the national grid will go without power.

The postponement, Kalisa says has no specific date adding the company, “We shall inform the general public of dates and time required to complete this exercise.”

Accordingly, the upgrade of the prepayment system was meant to allow old data be archived to decrease the number of transactions in the database thus increasing speed of access into the system.

“It was also enable EUCL to reduce the time system repaid and increase system availability,’ he added

Also, the upgrade is likely to allow electricity purchase database create a disaster recovery plan in case of system failure.