US$750M investment to target electricity theft, losses this year

Prime Minister Brigadier (ret’d) Mark Phillips on Monday revealed a US$750 million investment that will specifically target the issue of electricity theft and losses.

For 2024, the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) recorded a 25 per cent loss in electricity.

To counter this issue, PM Phillips said, “We continue with our project of changing out meters because with the modern metering I mean it is costly, but that itself will help with reducing the loss.”

He further revealed plans for significant investment to address the issue.

“We intend to spend in 2025, some US$750 million dollars. We will start spending towards building out and modernising the whole transmission and distribution system which in itself will contribution to reduction in line loss,” the Prime Minister said.

Meanwhile, Minister of Public Works Deodat Indar provided further clarification, explaining that the 25 per cent loss includes both technical and commercial losses.

“The commercial losses that is the term they use for people when they run a wire from the pole to the house [or] when they do something to the meter, when one man get a meter and he split it to entire community,” Indar explained highlighted that 12 per cent commercial losses were recorded last year.

He added, “How do you fix that? You ensure you have very good monitoring and inspection systems and work on changing out defective meters. This has been very high in the past, but we have worked to bring it down.”

Technical losses mainly come from line losses during the transfer of power from the point of generation to the point of distribution.

Indar noted that GPL started upgrading all transmission lines and continues efforts to modernise infrastructure.