GPL slips down electricity reduction target, deploying more inspectors

Last Updated on Tuesday, 7 January 2025, 9:11 by Writer

The Guyana Power and Light (GPL) is still losing 12.5% of its electricity generation to theft but efforts are continuing to reduce those commercial losses, Prime Minister Mark Phillips said Monday.

No dollar figure was provided but Mr Phillips said overall, the state-owned power company was losing a total of 25% of its generation to losses, half of which is attributed to commercial losses.

Based on that account, GPL registered a slippage in its loss reduction plan, as its 2024-2028 development and expansion plan had forecast 2024 to see a 22.20% drop, with technical losses at 9.31% and commercial losses at 12.89%.

“This, in the past, has been very high and we’ve worked to bring it down,” he told a news conference that was shared with Minister of Public Works, Deodat Indar. GPL’s development and expansion states that “progressively”, total losses of the company have been decreasing from 30.9% in 2013 to 24.92% in 2022.

In 2025, that utility company wants to reduce its total losses to 20.47% of which technical losses will be 9.11% and commercial losses will be 11.36%.

Public Works Minister Indar clarified that commercial losses is loosely called electricity theft. “The commercial losses—that’s the term they use when people ‘jook’ the wire, when they run a wire from the pole into the house…when one man got a meter and he split it to the entire community—that is what we call commercial losses,” he said

The Prime Minister said GPL was continuing to replace meters with advanced ones to help cut the losses, in addition to modernising the transmission and distribution system at a cost of US$750 million. “Most of the time it comes from the line losses. You lose power from the point of generation to the point of distribution,” Mr Indar added. He also said that the power company would be beefing up its inspectorate.

The GPL development and expansion plan forecasts that by 2028, total losses will be 9.96%.