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Govt spends US$42M to save 2% line loss
….Power Company told to still prepare for Amaila Hydro–Dindyal
“…the strategies being employed to date to fight losses are too labour intensive with a high probability for fraud and corruption practices resulting from unscrupulous employees” Kumar Sharma
Guyana Power and Light Company (GPL) will go ahead and prepare for the Amaila Falls Hydroelectric Project given that it has been advised by the administration that the project has only been delayed by a year.
CEO of Guyana Power and Light Company Bharrat Dindyal
Chief Executive Officer of the power company, Bharrat Dindyal, yesterday met with members of the public and supported by his top lieutenants, provided a briefing on the operations of the company in the past year and the first half of 2013.
Dindyal, during the presentation, said that the administration had informed the power company that it was in search of additional partners to ensure the completion of the project.
Losses
The power company boss also disclosed that on the matter of technical and commercial losses which stand at some 31 per cent, now that GPL has done a significant amount of work on the generation side of things they can now focus on loss reduction.
He said that the massive US$42M upgrade to the distribution network being undertaken by the Chinese, when completed will reduce the losses by about two per cent.
As it relates to the massive theft and significant commercial losses through meter tampering and illegal connections it was noted that the power company will have to expend enormous sums of money to effectively curb its losses.
Dindyal said that this would in part be dependent on Government providing financing on a concessionary basis.
The power company official, said that in the near future, GPL would be instituting a pilot programme primarily in the local Georgetown business hub to demonstrate the effectiveness of its newest metering system.
The company’s loss reduction manager, Kumar Sharma, in his presentation on stemming the losses incurred said that the initial project is being funded in part through a US$5M Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) loan.
In order to complete the ‘Advance Metering Infrastructure’ project and have the new state of the art meters installed across the nation it would amount to some US$48M.
GPL’s Deputy CEO, Aeshwar Deonarine makes a point on the company’s financial performance
This would be in addition to the US$90M GPL has committed to spend over the coming five years in its distribution and expansion plan.
According to the power company official it is not a matter of the company not knowing what to do to curb its losses but it is just that the amounts required is simply not available.
Responding to critics that the power company has been performing poorly in terms of the losses it suffers, Dindyal retorted that the current upgrade to the system in the form of the Chinese funded programme, represents the first major investment to tackle losses in the system in the history of GPL.
According to Dindyal what the company had been focusing on initially was the generation capacity of power company.
He said that with the coming on stream of the 26MW plant at Vreed-en-Hoop, the power company will be in a better position to now focus on losses.
“We are playing catch up…We were in a huge hole,” said Dindyal and he said that it can be very easy to criticize the power company over its losses but it must be recognized the progress made over the years.
Kumar in presenting an overview of the loss reduction strategy for the power company said that “the strategies being employed to date to fight losses are too labour intensive with a high probability for fraud and corruption practices resulting from unscrupulous employees.”
He said that the loss reduction department has the highest staff turn-over for the power company given that the employees are routinely found to be engaged in corrupt practices and would have to be fired.
Kumar concluded that “technological solutions are extremely costly but have shown to work in many parts of the world…we as a company and a country will have to embrace technology to help us reduce the levels of losses.”
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