⚡ Energy

ECG Smart Prepaid Metering in Greater Accra

Ghana's state utility began swapping Greater Accra's postpaid and legacy meters for prepaid meters tied to a central Meter Management System in 2024 - ECG can read consumption remotely, flag tampering and let customers vend credit anywhere. ECG announced 450,000 replacements in Accra West and 250,000 in Accra East. The regulator summoned it over depletion complaints in February 2026.

Live 📅 since 2024 ◆ Source-checked

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-01

⚡ Energy Smart grid & energy Sensors & IoT

🎓 Lesson

A meter that reports back to the utility does not report to the customer. Two years into the rollout the regulator gave ECG 48 hours to explain why prepaid units were draining faster than expected - and neither side could settle it from the meter data, which only one of them can read.

Evidence• No measured figure

Scale🗺️ Regional

📖 Terms in this entry: Smart grid · Adaptive traffic signals · Digital twin

Sources

↗ Ghana News Agency - ECG to replace 450,000 meters in Accra West Region (March 2024)State news agency: more than 450,000 postpaid, non-smart-prepaid and faulty meters to be replaced with MMS-compliant smart prepaid meters over five months, under ECG's Loss Reduction Programme, to improve energy accounting and reduce system losses.

↗ MyJoyOnline - ECG begins mass replacement of obsolete meters with smart MMS-compliant prepaid meters (26 Aug 2024)Accra East region, 250,000 meters, 2-30 September 2024, across eight operational districts; describes the Meter Management System as the standard governing data exchange between meters and the utility, plus remote top-up via the ECG Power App.

↗ ECG - Accra West installs smart prepaid meters in Wiaboman (16 Oct 2025)Operator's own post showing the rollout still under way in late 2025, framed around reducing commercial losses. Automated fetch returned an empty body; headline and date confirmed via search index.

↗ GBC Ghana Online - PURC summons ECG over rapid depletion of prepaid units (Feb 2026)The regulator's 25 February 2026 letter citing widespread complaints of rapid depletion after the January tariff adjustment, with a 48-hour deadline for ECG to respond.

↗ ModernGhana - Smart pre-paid meters not responsible for higher consumption, ECG tells customersECG's rebuttal, kept so the entry does not imply the meters caused the depletion complaints - the causal question is unresolved.

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

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Compare this project

🇨🇴 Prepaid Smart Water Metering (Agua Prepago) · Medellín Prepaid utility metering with the same tension between access and disconnection - water in Medellin, electricity in Accra. 🇨🇦 Toronto Hydro Smart Meters and Ontario's Time-of-Use Pricing · Toronto Mandated meter rollouts whose benefit case their own auditors and regulators questioned afterwards. 🇬🇭 Area-Wide Traffic Signal Control System & Accra Traffic Management Centre · Accra Another verified project from Accra.

Explore the wider context

📟 A Reading Is Not a Decision 🔌 Smart grid & energy guide 🏙️ Accra city profile ⚡ Energy projects

📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “ECG Smart Prepaid Metering in Greater Accra” — Accra, Ghana. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/accra-ecg-smart-prepaid-metering/ (last verified 2026-08-01). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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