Taken at face value, the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) Incorporated’s Energy Conservation Cam-paign launched last week is an admirable step in the right direction. Conserving energy not only saves money, but the environment as well.
Years before conservation became sexy or Al Gore dreamed of producing his Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth, environmentalists had been pleading with governments and people to move in this direction because of the damage fossil fuels were wreaking on the earth. At the time, many of them were viewed as exaggerators, nay-sayers or just plain nuisances.
Nevertheless, they stuck with the issue and people began to pay attention. Great strides have since been made throughout the world with regard to saving the environment, though not as many as should have been made by now. The mechanism for achieving this is the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and seeks to have developed countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to counteract global warming.
The USA, though it signed the protocol on November 12, 1998, has resisted ratifying it. However, individual states have taken measures to cut emissions and American companies have been producing energy efficient appliances and ‘green’ cars for a few years now. A clear sign that conservation has taken root in the US was the disclosure that this year, New York’s biggest Christmas tradition, the Rockefeller Center tree is lit by 30,000 light emitting diodes (LEDs) , powered by solar panels.
While it has been hinted that in some instances the moves towards ‘clean’ energy are not to protect the earth but just plain economics – because fossil fuels have become too expensive and too difficult to acquire – environmentalists will not quibble at this.
This is clearly the case in India, which passed its Energy Conservation Act in 2001 to ensure that certain designated sectors follow the energy audit process, but found that compliance particularly in the commercial sector, was based purely on the cost factor; as is the case in Guyana. Not much more than lip service was paid to energy conservation here before the power company found itself in dire straits recently. And this should not have been.
At the launching of the campaign, GPL’s Chief Executive Officer Mr Bharrat Dindyal revealed that in 2005, when fuel cost US$30 a barrel, the company spent some $760 million a month on fuel, which translates to some $9.1 billion a year or more given that electricity use escalates at Christmas time. The CEO did not say, but how likely is it that the company would have collected that much revenue in 2005; or any given year for that matter. And even if it did, simple math, taking into account staff salaries, payments to contractors and replacing damaged equipment among other things, would indicate that the GPL has been digging itself into a hole. Added to which, there is still a limit to the amount of power the national grid can supply at any one time. Surely, an annual $9 billion fuel bill would give anyone pause for thought, even with the increase in tariffs that same year.
Instead, the government and the power company marched on with the unserved areas programme, adding to the strain on the national grid and even chiding some communities for not taking up the power offer, since this would have implications for the funding being provided by the Inter-American Development Bank. Consideration must have been given to the fact that some of the people who would be accessing electricity as new consumers would not just have wanted lights, but all the appliances they never could have before as well. And therefore, there should have been moves since then to have importers purchase more energy efficient appliances for retail sale.
However, it is not too late. There cannot be many people among GPL’s 136,000 customers who are happy with paying high electricity bills, if indeed there are any. Getting everyone to switch off something, particularly if they will see the concomitant reduction in their bills should not be too difficult a feat.
The plan to introduce a pre-paid system is also an excellent idea. Pre-payment would allow the consumer to decide how much s/he is willing to spend on electricity each month and could help him/her to budget more effectively. The technology would likely require massive investment in terms of new meters and computer software as well as time to implement it. However, GPL said it intended to make an announcement with regard to this shortly. When and if it is ever introduced it should be optional.
Finally, GPL also still needs to deal with its significant number of unmetered “customers”. One way of identifying them would be to map the legitimate consumers, which could be a tedious process. Having the detection crews work at night or on holidays might also provide better results or offering anonymity as well as maybe one month of free electricity to anyone who reports and identifies power thieves.
