GECOL Prepaid Electricity Meters
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.
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Tripoli households now buy their power before they use it: top up the card meter by phone, or the lights go out. The grid sheds load anyway. The meter decides who pays, not whether there is electricity.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ Tripoli city profile · 🔌 Smart grid & energy guide · ⚡ Energy projects
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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When the power is short: four utilities, four things published
None of these adds a megawatt. Each is a data layer laid over a shortage, and what the utility chooses to publish decides what a household can do about it — and what the neighbours can see.
| Project | Since | Status | Outcome | Evidence | Run by | Cost | What the utility publishes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EDM-SA Published Load-Shedding Schedule for BamakoBamako, 🇲🇱 | 2024 | Live | Ongoing | Media | Utility or public operator | not public | When the power will go off, by neighbourhood — which turned the complaint from 'there is no power' into 'the plan is not respected here'. |
| Jirama Load-Shedding Forecasts and Water Rotation SchedulesAntananarivo, 🇲🇬 | 2024 | Live | Ongoing | Official | Utility or public operator | not public | A weekly forecast for power and a nightly rota for water. The gap between the schedule and the street became a political fact rather than a private one. |
| GECOL Prepaid Electricity MetersTripoli, 🇱🇾 | 2022 | Live | Ongoing | Official | Utility or public operator | not public | Who has paid, and nothing about supply — so a household can be cut off twice, for two unrelated reasons. |
| Holding Its Own Customers Below the National Load-Shedding StageCape Town, 🇿🇦 | 2015 | Live | Ongoing | Independent | Utility or public operator | ≈R1.2bn budgeted in 2023 for Steenbras: about R1bn refurbishment and expansion plus about R200m maintenance over nine years | Nothing, and it does not need to: the city dispatches a pumped-storage scheme it already owned and simply sheds less than it was told to. |
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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.