Guyana Power and Light (GPL) incorporated has once again failed to reach several key benchmarks in the delivery of service including the frequency and duration of blackouts and system losses.
This year’s review of the eight benchmarks in GPL’s Operating Standards and Performance Targets (OSPT), saw company executives telling the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) that while there has been continuous improvements in both of these areas they have still not met their projected achievements in the year 2019.
Additionally the company has failed to collect approximately $7 billion from the Guyana Water Incorporated (GWI) over the last two years.
According to Divisional Director of Finance Loris Nathoo the utility company incurs between $220 million and $250 million in debt monthly but has stated that it does not have the funds to pay it light bill.
Deputy Chief Executive Officer Renford Homer explained that this failure continues to be a “major challenge”.
“We have not been receiving payments over the year despite our engagements and of course notification of the shareholder,” he lamented adding that if GWI had been fulfilling its obligations GPL would have reached its receivables benchmark.
Nathoo added that the current government is aware of GWI’s debt which GPL fully expects to be resolved in a “short space of time”.
The only benchmarks GPL was able to reach related to the billing of customers and the repayment of creditors.
The company had committed to issue bills to Maximum Demand Customers including domestic and small businesses within seven days of reading the meter. They were able to accomplish this goal within five days. For non-maximum demand customers a goal of 10 days was set but the company was able to deliver these bills on average within nine days.
GPL also managed to achieve its goal of paying its creditors within 26 days of the incurred debt.
In the case of power outages GPL had committed itself under the System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI) to delivering no more than 68 blackouts during the year to households. Its actual result was 104 blackouts. There were however only five shutdowns of the Demerara-Berbice Inter-connected System (DBIS) a significant improvement from the 12 in 2018 and 25 shutdowns in 2017.
For 2020 there have so far been three shutdowns of the DBIS resulting in blackout from Parika to Moleson Creek. GPL explained that only one of these was a results of a fault at a company generating plant. The other two resulted from construction works which touched a major power line and a storm which uprooted trees that then severed a different major line.
Addressing the duration of power outages the company revealed that the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI) which measures the actual hours of blackout was projected to reflect no more than 80 hours per citizen instead it recorded 104 hours.
Additionally the company continues to miss the mark on overall systems losses for both technical and non-technical losses, the former describing the bleeding of power from decrepit transmission and distribution infrastructure and the latter encompassing areas such as theft and tampering with meters. For 2019, GPL had set itself a target of limiting losses to 25.7% of dispatched power and it ended up with a figure of 27.6%.
At the beginning of the year the company committed to producing 97% of Maximum Demand Bills based on actual meter readings but managed to only produce 91%. They also committed to producing 90% of non-Maximum Demand Bills based on actual meter readings but managed 89%.
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