GECOL Prepaid Electricity Meters
🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below 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.
GECOL began converting Tripoli households to card-based prepaid electricity meters with a pilot in Zawiyat al-Dahmani in March 2022, then extended it to further districts including al-Njilah. Customers buy credit at sales centres, by bank auto-debit, or straight from mobile balance by dialling *200# on Libyana's Khalis service; when the balance reaches zero the supply stops. GECOL reported 66,500 meters for small consumers and 1,500 for large ones by September 2023 — about a seventh of its own 500,000 target for that year — and has never published a Tripoli-only figure.
📊 Impact
GECOL reported 66,500 prepaid meters installed for small consumers and 1,500 for large consumers by September 2023, against its own stated target of 500,000 by the end of that year. The company has not published a breakdown by city, so the Tripoli share is unknown; the named installation sites in the reporting are Tripoli neighbourhoods.
🎓 Lesson
A prepaid meter settles who pays, not whether there is power. GECOL rations supply by load shedding — Libya Herald reported in July 2026 that organised load shedding had been rising since June and that the Tripoli government was prioritising domestic over industrial users — while the card now rations consumption, so a household can be cut off twice for unrelated reasons. The utility also began in residential districts rather than with the large consumers, factories and workshops that MP Abdelsalam Naseya said were the real problem.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “GECOL Prepaid Electricity Meters” — Tripoli, Libya. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/tripoli-prepaid-electricity-meters/ (last verified 2026-08-07). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.