Latest update May 12th, 2024 12:59 AM
May 30, 2013 News
– almost 30% of customers hooked up countrywide
The state-owned power company says it has detected quite a number of its prepaid meters being tampered with.
As a matter of fact, almost two percent of the 30,000 or so of the meters, which were introduced starting over two years ago, have shown signs of being illegally “fixed”.
But the Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) is not too worried as its sophisticated database is flagging the suspicious customers.
According to GPL’s Chief Executive Officer, Bharat Dindyal, the illegal tampering of the accuracy of the meters was mainly to prevent disconnection. The system shuts the power to the home off after the credit runs out.
But GPL’s database is designed to raise red flags for customers who are burning a suspiciously low amount or have not bought credit for a while.
“We have gone out and investigated these instances,” Dindyal disclosed in a recent interview.
“In a number of cases, the low consumption is genuine.”
GPL would visit those locations that are flagged and in most cases the homes are empty because of the owners being overseas or the homes not being used.
In other cases, the owners took the decision to have the meters disabled.
“We have advised these customers to buy a token amount of electricity so that GPL can actually see what they are buying,” Dindyal explained.
But the power company is also finding cases where persons in an effort to steal the power, deliberately use a bypass on the meter.
“These are easy to detect. And we are dealing with these cases. There is really no metering technology in the market now that is Guyanese-proof,” a serious CEO said.
Other countries have worked with the manufacturers of the meters to redesign aspects of the installations.
However, prepaid meters are relatively new to Guyana and the country simply has not got around to it.
“We have to continue to be vigilant. We are looking at some systems but there are not any Guyanese-proof systems.”
While initially, there have been suspicions over the prepaid meters, these have caught on fast with almost 30 per cent of the GPL’s 160,000-odd customers now hooked up.
It costs GPL around US$125 to install one of the meters and despite a US$1.2M order two months back, the supply is already exhausted.
GPL is now preparing to order more. (Leonard Gildarie)
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