Prepaid Metering Empowerment for Reliable Billing and Energy Management of Electricity Consumers in Nigeria

The complaints from the consumers of electricity on the unreliability of supplies from the distribution company along its distribution network in Nigeria, as well as high estimated bills for the energy used with estimated billing; with the management of the available supplies to take care of needs of consumers with limited resources with consumers acceptability of cost to benefit ratio is discussed. The work takes a deliberate look at the electricity consumers consumption pattern with the use of estimated bills and pre-paid meters in one of the major estates in Ekiti State, Nigeria; with the spearman's rank order correlation used to validate that pre-paid metering of consumers electricity consumption gives a better need based energy management, in which case, with the use of prepaid metering system, there is a reduced case of lost income, and waste in comparison to the present demand based management system.