GPL records $5B losses annually due to electricity theft

– to focus on prosecuting offenders

The Guyana Power and Light (GPL) Incorporated will be refocusing on prosecution of persons who steal electricity as an avenue to counter the company’s annual loss of approximately $5 billion  to electricity theft.
During a press conference on Wednesday, GPL Chief Executive Officer Bharat Dindyal told reporters that electricity theft accounted for about 60 per cent of the power company’s non-technical loss.

As such, he noted that while GPL has been spending billions to stop the illegal practice, there was need now to try other methods of curbing this such as prosecution.
“We recently resume focus on prosecuting people for electricity theft. That is going to be a major focus next year… We have had thousands of people who have been caught, who are in the courts, but the matters are languishing because we can’t dispense with three or four thousand cases… But we have to reintroduce prosecution,” Dindyal posited.
According to the GPL boss, there are currently some 15,000 illegal street lights across the country. He noted too that the company was also battling the fact that persons and companies, including some large entities, were hiring private personnel and even former GPL employees to tamper with meters.
Another issue the power company is grappling with is going into communities where there is widespread electricity theft.
“That calls for a team to go into those areas and that’s a huge problem right now. We’re assessing how do we mitigate the risk of sending in a team into an area where almost everybody stealing [electricity] and they’re prepared to bring harm to anybody who tries to dissuade them from doing that,” he said.
Nevertheless, the GPL boss disclosed that the power company has even rehired a Loss Reduction Director and has brought in experts to assist with its loss reduction project. That project, which costs some US$40 million, includes upgrading the network and installing ‘sophisticated’ meters among other measures.
“So, the experts who were here, they basically contended, at the end, that they have never come across a country quite like Guyana when it comes to electricity theft… It is an ongoing problem. What we are doing is going to a place where the system is so sophisticated that we can sit down in office and see what you’re doing with the meter at home. We have that capability currently now in a pilot project in the heart of the city,” the CEO revealed.
Dindyal noted that there were currently 19,000 meters with the AMI [Advanced Metering Infrastructure] capability being installed as part of that pilot project.
But the GPL boss posited that even the contractors the company was hiring to carry out projects such as this were tampering with the meters before installing them.
“Right now, as we’re installing sophisticated meters costing about US$300 per meter, we’re seeing contractors vandalising them in large numbers…,” he stated.
The CEO further explained that there was another strategy available to the company, that is, infrastructure that is designed to kill persons who attempt to access power illegally. However, it has been advised against this by legal experts.
“We would not wish to get to that. We wish to step back a bit and see what else we can do,” he stressed.
But according to Dindyal, GPL has done enough and there was nothing much the company could do in terms of “hardening its network” against this illegal practice.
He contended that a change in attitude was what might be needed to counter electricity theft in Guyana.
“It is a huge problem and it calls for, I think, an across-the-board culture change… There is nothing we can do on our side. We have employed quiet coercion, we have done public education, we have appealed, we have brought technology. But what we don’t have is a change in attitude… It has to be done, I am thinking, by a combination of policing and quiet coercion,” the GPL boss asserted.