By Eileen Cox
Continued from last week
For the benefit of all customers of Guyana Power and Light Incorporated (GPL), we publish the concluding paragraphs of the letter in which Acting Chief Executive Officer of the company Bharat Dindyal explained Pre-paid metering. The opening paragraphs were published in Consumer Concerns, Sunday Stabroek, March 23, 2008. Here are the final paragraphs:
“A. As I mentioned before, GPL held its first stakeholder consultation in December 2006 and the Guyana Consumers Association was invited. Over twenty stakeholders were invited including the PUC, Chambers of Commerce Manufacture’s Association, Bar Association, various Consumer Groups, Office of the Prime Minister etc.
“We have not aggressively marketed the introduction of this new technology as yet as we were trying to secure financing. We have now done so and would be starting the public education progress shortly. We have never taken our customers for granted and don’t propose to do so now.
“B. You should know that there is a fundamental difference between telecommunications metering and electricity metering. In telecommunications, metering the meter is actually a computer located in the telephone exchange serving your area. This computer is linked to the company’s billing system so that the billing system can signal the computer to disconnect your service at any time.
“With electricity, each customer’s meter is located on their house so that they can read it. We will have to spend billions of dollars to interconnect 136,000 meters countrywide to our billing system. This is far more expensive than pre-paid metering.
“C. There are some interesting observations here. Our billing system produces 136,000 bills every month. Less than 0.5 of 1% of these had problems but we need to totally eradicate this and hope to do so with our new billing system. Any crisis in our billing system is more of a perception than reality.
“The hundreds of millions of dollars customers owe us is because the law does allow us to deny customers service if they are not creditworthy. We are obligated to provide service. You can deny someone the opportunity to rent your property if you know they are not creditworthy or are dishonest, but in GPL’s case we have to provide a service as long as you meet certain requirements, none of which is creditworthiness.
“Pre-paid metering would make arrears a thing of the past. Nobody owes us so we can provide a better service. The problem of electricity theft is our fundamental problem.
We had said that the problem of electricity theft in Guyana is unparalleled in the English-speaking Caribbean. The only country that comes close to us is Jamaica and on a percentage basis, we steal twice as much as them.
“We lose over $2.5 billion of electricity a year and if Guyanese stop stealing electricity for the next five years, we can see a dramatic improvement in the service while the electricity rates will fall. One year after electricity theft stops we will build a new power station in Georgetown and retire all the old equipment we now have. Within the following four years, we will expand our transmission system and modernize our distribution network so that every customer receives North American quality service.
“The fundamental problem is therefore electricity theft and this has to be tackled first. With this solved, money will be available to attend to the technical deficiencies.
Our technical losses are only about 3% higher that other Caribbean countries but electricity theft is more than 6,000% higher than most countries. GPL cannot on its own deal with this problem, as technology alone cannot solve it. We all have a role to play and the sooner we all take a stand the better.”
Yours faithfully,
Bharat Dindyal
CHO (Ag.) GPL
