PUC fines GPL for operating below standards

Jul 24, 2019 News

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The Public Utilities Commission, (PUC) has imposed a monetary fine on the Guyana Power and Light, (GPL) over a failure to meet the operating standards set for the year 2018.

According to the PUC, in the reporting year 2018, after taking into account inter alia the failure of the company to achieve its Operating Standards and Performance Targets (OSPT) set for the year, the Commission had determined that a penalty of 5% of the total value of dividend payable to the company’s shareholders should be imposed.
The Commission noted that following a hearing held on June 20, 2019, of GPL performance based on standards and targets set, it was determined that the power company had performed below the goals set.
The report further outlined that representatives of GPL give explanations as regards each standard not achieved.
According to the information, the power company had among other things, set a limit the average number of outages which consumers received during the year 2018 to no more than 70.
However, the average number of outages experienced by a consumer during 2018 was 106.
Further, GPL set a standard to limit the average duration of outages that a consumer would have received during the year to no more than 80 hours.
The average duration experienced by consumers during the year was 112.41 hours.
GPL said that the reason for these failures included the absence of adequate back up or redundancy in the generation and transmission systems.
According to GPL, significant deficiencies in the design and configuration of some of the substations and the poor state of a significant portion of the transmission’s infrastructure, its constant failures and maintenance challenges also resulted in the short fall.
The Utility body also put voltage standard in place.
The voltage standard requires that GPL “shall seek to maintain in stable conditions, voltages of + 5% of the nominal voltage and + 10% following a system disturbance.
However, the company maintained it would be difficult to monitor and report on the voltage supplied to each customer.
This standard was also not measured in the previous year.
At the previous OSPT hearing in 2018, the company reported that with the installation of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) the company would be in a position to randomly access data from the registry of these meters which would then enable the company to report on voltage fluctuations.
At this year’s hearing, the company reiterated its commitment to report on this standard using the information provided from the AMI meters.
As an alternative to reporting on the standard, GPL has committed to complete 100% of customers’ voltage complaints which range from network reconfigurations, vegetation, upgrade of lines, and additional transformer in no more than 30 days.
To this end GPL has reported that 97% of the voltage complaints were completed within the stipulated time frame.
Further it was noted that notwithstanding the fact that the standards of System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) and System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) were not met for the reporting year 2018, there has been a marked improvement on its 2017 performance as it relates to these standards.
The Commission also commended the company for its rollout of some 30,000 Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) which will greatly assist in the company’s reduction of system losses, since the AMI allows for remote monitoring and detection of tampering.
The PUC committed to providing the company with the ability in 2019 and succeeding years, to report on the voltage regulation standard.
The Commission, however, considers the company’s failure to improve its services in the face of our imposition of a monetary penalty in 2018 of 5% of the total value of the dividends, as a material breach of its obligations to the consumers.
The Commission further signaled to the company that its inability to achieve all of the standards as set out in the company’s 2016-2020 Development and Expansion Programme, does not auger well for the efficiency of the company vis-a-vis its customers.
Whilst the Commission has decided not to impose a further penalty at this time it will continue to closely monitor quarterly the operations of GPL in 2019 with a view to ensuring that there is compliance with all the standards and targets and it intends to take a no tolerance stance with respect to GPL’s less than stellar quality of service reviews.
To this end, the Commission requests the timely submission of GPL’s quarterly reports on their standards and targets.

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