The estimated billing system for electricity was introduced in Nigeria by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) in 2012 for billing customers without meters or with faulty or inaccessible meters. But instead of following the guidelines and formula provided by NERC for the estimation, the electricity Distribution Companies (DisCos) resorted to billing these customers arbitrarily and frustrated efforts by NERC to ensure the proper metering of electricity consumers. This research evaluates the incentive, which makes the DisCos in Nigeria prefer the estimating billing system to a much more efficient smart prepaid metering system. To carry out the research, four Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) customers were selected. The estimated bills of these customers, which they received before they got smart prepaid meters, were compared with their prepaid meter bills for an equal period. EEDC was found to be over-billing these customers under the estimated billing system by a yearly average per customer of 64,901.67 Nigerian Naira (170.79 USD).

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The major cause of deterioration in lead-acid batteries is sulfation. There are patents on the use of high-frequency pulse desulfators to desulfate lead-acid batteries. Also, many products available in the market worldwide claim to use this technique to effectively desulfate lead-acid batteries that deteriorate due to sulfation. But there are little or no systematic studies to evaluate the performance of these products to know whether they do what their manufacturers claim. This research, therefore, aims at empirically evaluating one of such products. Four fully charged 100 Ampere-hour Valve Regulated Lead-Acid Gel batteries were discharged with an electronic-load battery discharger to ascertain their capacities. Thereafter, a high-frequency pulse desulfator was connected to desulfate the battery bank consisting of the four batteries. The battery bank was connected to be charged at the same time by a photovoltaic system. The desulfation experiment lasted for ten weeks but the batteries were tested to know their capacities after two, six, and ten weeks. The results show that the desulfation device works in desulfating lead-acid batteries as there are different degrees of improvement on the capacity of all the batteries. The percentage improvement in the capacity of the batteries is 89.5%, 75.9%, 1.6% and 1.4%, for batteries 1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively.

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