1001 Smart Cities
⚡ Energy
🇿🇲 Lusaka

ZESCO Smart Grid Pilot in Roma Township

ZESCO Limited, Zambia's national power utility, is piloting a smart-grid upgrade in Lusaka's Roma Township (and, per an earlier 2025 announcement, neighbouring Kanyama) with private partner Beacon Power Services. The project maps existing electrical assets (meters, poles, transformers), installs prepaid smart meters that support remote usage monitoring, automatic tamper detection and remote top-ups, and migrates customers to a new digital billing platform. According to ZESCO, the pilot is designed to run six months and could inform a nationwide rollout if it succeeds in cutting unplanned outages and improving billing accuracy.

Live 📅 since 2026

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

⚡ EnergySmart grid & energySensors & IoT
Scale🧪 Pilot

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

Sources

↗ ZESCO Limited — official media statement (Facebook, utility's own channel)Primary source: ZESCO's own announcement of the Roma smart grid pilot with Beacon Power Services, describing the three-phase rollout and six-month timeframe.
↗ Energy News Africa — trade press coverageIndependent press writeup naming the exact streets covered and installation start date (11 Feb 2026).
↗ News Diggers (Zambian daily) — local press coverageSecond independent local outlet corroborating the launch and six-month pilot duration.
↗ ZESCO Limited — earlier Facebook post on the March 2025 Roma/Kanyama pilotEstablishes an earlier, near-identically described pilot dated 17 March 2025 — needs reconciling against the Feb 2026 announcement before publication.

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

🇬🇭 ECG Smart Prepaid Metering in Greater Accra · Accra Both are African utilities piloting prepaid smart meters remotely — ZESCO's six-month Roma trial, ECG's much wider rollout. 🇳🇦 Prepaid Water Metering, Token by Token · Windhoek Windhoek's prepaid water tokens need no telemetry at all; Lusaka's ZESCO pilot wires meters for monitoring and tamper detection. 🇨🇭 ewz Smart Meter Rollout on the City Fibre Network · Zürich Contrast in scale: Zurich's ewz began rolling out smart meters in 2024 toward ~300,000 by 2029; Lusaka's ZESCO pilot covers one township.

Explore the wider context

📟 A Reading Is Not a Decision🔌 Smart grid & energy guide🏙️ Lusaka city profile⚡ Energy projects
📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “ZESCO Smart Grid Pilot in Roma Township” — Lusaka, Zambia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/lusaka-zesco-smart-grid-roma/ (last verified 2026-08-02). Data: CC BY 4.0.

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

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