Despite the Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) performing below standards for the operating year of 2018, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has decided not to impose a further penalty on the company.
This was revealed through the PUC’s first order of the year, which was released on Tuesday, following the presentation and scrutiny of GPL’s performance figures for 2018 on June 20th.
According to the order, after careful consideration of every aspect of the presentation made by the company, the PUC has determined that notwithstanding the fact that the standards of the System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) and the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) were not met for the reporting year of 2018, there had been a marked improvement by the company over its performance in 2017.
As a result, the order stated that the PUC has decided not to impose a further penalty but it added that it will continue to closely monitor the quarterly operations of GPL this year, with a view of ensuring that there is compliance with all the standards and targets.
The targets are in the areas of customer interruptions, voltage regulation, meter reading, issuing of bills, accounts payable, accounts receivable, system losses and average availability.
If the PUC finds that the company has failed to meet its Operating Standards and Performance Targets, it can impose a monetary penalty on the company in an amount not exceeding 25% of the total value of the dividend payable to the company’s shareholders in the calendar year.
The PUC also intends to “take a no tolerance stance” with respect to GPL’s “less than stellar quality of service reviews,” and, to this end, it will request the timely submission of the company’s quarterly reports on its Standards and Targets.
The order also notes that the PUC considered the company’s failure to improve its services in the face of an 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 wishes to signal to the company that its inability to achieve all of its standards as set out in the company’s 2016-2020 Development and Expansion Programme, does not augur well for the efficiency of the company visa-a-vis its customers,” the order said.
The PUC also noted that while it recognises that the operating standards are set within the framework of the company’s existing infrastructure and cash flow limitations, it falls short of what constitutes an efficient utility, and there remains much to be done to attain those standards.
“…And we can only hope in the near future that there will be incremental improvements in the quality of service to its customers,” the order noted.
As it relates to the SAIFI, the standard is expected to be limited to an average number of outages to no more than 70, however, for 2018 the average number of outages experienced by GPL’s consumers stood at 106. For the SAIDI, while the standard is an average of no more than 80 hours of power outages, in 2018, GPL recorded 112.41 hours.
GPL had said that the failures were due to the absence of adequate back up or redundancy in the generation and transmission systems, significant deficiencies in the design and configuration of some of the substations, and the poor state of a significant portion of the transmission’s infrastructures and its constant failures and maintenance challenges.
As it relates to meter reading, GPL is required to read 97% of maximum demand customers and 90% of non-maximum demand customers, but was only able to read 91% of the former and 90% of the latter.
GPL is also required to issue maximum demand bills within seven days and non-maximum demand bills without 10 days after the meters have been read. However, on average, maximum demand bills were issued within five days, while non-maximum demand bills were issued within eight days.
GPL’s target standard of system losses is set at 26.6% dispatched power (the electricity that GPL delivers through its transmission system for sale to consumers). However, for last year, its system losses stood at 27.7% of dispatched power. For this, the company had reported that a field survey undertaken in 2018 revealed that there are 19,000 streetlights that are spread across the country, of which, 9,000 were not metered and escaped the billing cycle. As a result, it estimated that if the streetlights were metered and billed, systems losses would have been reduced by a further 1.4%, which would have resulted in the standard being met.
The PUC did commend GPL for its rollout of some 30,000 Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) that will assist in the reduction of system losses, since the AMI allows for remote monitoring and detection of tampering. The new system will also provide the company with the ability in this year, and succeeding years, to report on the voltage regulation standard.
