The Kenya Power and Lighting Company (KPLC) will halt the prepaid system next week to allow for data migration to new hardware.
Through an advertisement, the company said that the shutdown will happen from Tuesday 9th April 11.00 pm to Wednesday 10th April 6.00 pm.
“During this period, our customers will not be able to purchase electricity tokens in our banking halls, prepaid pay bill number and via all other prepaid vending channels,” KPLC stated.
According to KPLC, the shutdown is meant to allow for the improvement of service delivery.
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The company, through the M-PESA PayBill number 888880 processes 85 percent of the 200,000 electronic purchase of tokens a day.
Third party vendors and agents including Dynamo and VendIT process the rest of the transactions.
KPLC has had a fair share of challenges in the prepaid system over the past year. However, this will be the first time customers will not be able to purchase tokens.
In January, there was an unexpected system failure attributed to a technical hitch that prevented households and businesses from buying electricity tokens for almost two days.
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The shutdown in January was met with lots of frustrations and KPLC took a long time to address the issue.
Meanwhile, electricity consumption among households has dropped regardless of the total number of domestic homes connected to the grid.
KPLC attributed the drop to the reclassification of users, which resulted in large domestic power users being moved to the commercial category and slow uptake of power by new domestic customers.
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In March, a survey by the company showed that electricity consumers under the domestic band represented by more than 6.7 million clients used 1,117 gigawatts (GWh) hours over the six months to December 2018 compared to 1,166GWh over a similar period in 2017.