Industry, mining and commerce owe Zesa via its ZETDC distribution subsidiary around ZiG4,2 billion, 74 percent of the total ZiG5,7 billion owed, with householders and small businesses owing just one percent of that total, less than ZiG57 million.
The reason for the vast difference is that almost all householders and small businesses no longer have the option to owe Zesa anything, they have been switched over to the pre-paid energy meters and if they want electricity they pay for it up front.
The business arrangement has been switched over, and Zesa only supplies these customers if it, in effect, owes them money.
That switchover eradicated a large chunk of the Zesa debt, that owed by households, and dramatically reduced its administrative costs, as it no longer needed meter readers, estimators and people to print and dispatch bills.
Staff could be concentrated in the technical sections, to maintain and repair the system, and even those technicians who once went out to cut someone's supply because they owed Zesa too much are now working to restore supplies after a fault.
In theory, Zesa could just cut supplies to a major mine or factory that owed money beyond the deadline, but there are complications including the public service of needing to keep the productive sectors of the economy producing.
But if there were no debts, and if everyone paid in advance, then Zesa would have major options, such as importing power. Mozambique has a surplus at present and is willing to sell, but needs to be paid.
So with the Kariba South station operating at a little more than a quarter its maximum because of the severe drought, Zesa has to fill the gap with load shedding, and regrettably it is the customers who pay, the households and small businesses, who are shed, not the large factories and mines that owe money. This is unfair.
The medium and large scale industrial, mining and commercial users were not switched to pre-paid meters because of their more complex tariffs.
They need first a more complex meter, and Zesa needs a special sort of meter for pre-paid systems. But these "smart meters" do exist and the initial cost of installing them will soon be covered by the huge advantages of having no one owing Zesa money.
Domestic and small business consumers buy electrical energy at a constant price. So their meters measure units. There is a sort of cross-subsidy in place, with small cheaper bands at the bottom end of each month's purchase, paid for from a lightly surcharged cost on all units over a certain amount, meaning that those in mansions subsidise, at a very small cost, those in small houses and flats.
But as a business grows it moves into a range of more complex tariffs that start including power, as well as energy, until the very largest consumers are basically paying for power, the maximum demand they hit each month.
There are many good reasons for this mix of power and energy components, the main one being that new capital development, the new power stations and other heavy duty infrastructure, is largely the result of the peak power demand, and that is almost a direct result of what heavy industry, mining and large-commercial enterprises drive. So their tariffs need to cover the new capital.
But there are also many advantages for these major consumers. If they can reduce their maximum demand, while at the same time spreading their energy consumption more evenly across the day, they can reduce their unit energy costs significantly.
Efficiency pays. This is why in some major factories even things like the canteen boilers and stoves are switched off for a couple of minutes, while a large machine is turned on with its accompanying surge of power demand, to keep the maximum demand level as low as possible.
Smart metering, while it allows Zesa to move towards prepaid power supplies even for its largest consumers, also allows those same consumers to monitor their power and energy consumption a lot better and make sensible decisions to raise what is called their load factor.
They pay on maximum demand, regardless of whether that maximum lasts one minute or all day.
A 100 percent load factor would mean that they were using a constant maximum demand 24/7, a one percent load factor would mean they were using just one percent of the energy they were paying for through the maximum demand tariff.
So financial managers try and press production managers to go for the spreading of loads and so get high load factors.
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The same sort of complex metering could presumably make it easy to allow net metering for those large consumers with solar supplies, being able to sell their solar power to Zesa when they were not using the panels.
At the same time, the introduction of these smart meters and prepaid supplies would allow Zesa to claw back the large sums it is owed, automatically, without damaging their customers and without relying on payment plans that are sometimes shelved.
When householder consumers were switched over, most owed Zesa money. There was a simple process that 20 percent of what they paid each month went on paying off the debt, a reasonable percentage so the debt would not be eternal, but at the same time an affordable extra.
Something similar in business would work as well. The payment plan would be both automatic and impossible to miss payments.
The advantages are so many, and with the technology available, Zesa needs to move very quickly to bring all consumers into the prepaid orbit, and consumers should welcome the moral pressure they will then be able to exert on Zesa, since having paid for the supply they are entitled to get it.
