MORE than 220 illegal connections. Roughly one megawatt of stolen power. Three days, four communities.
The numbers GPL’s Loss Reduction Department released this week should alarm every household in Guyana.
Let’s be unambiguous: stealing electricity is not a victimless hustle. It is an assault on public safety.
Every jumper wire strung across a fence or spliced into a meter box raises the odds of electrocution and fire for the person who rigged it, the neighbour’s child who wanders too close, and the GPL lineman sent to fix a fault nobody flagged.
It overloads transformers sized for a fixed customer base and degrades service for everyone else on the line, leaving paying customers to contend with surges, outages and their appliances ruined by dirty power.
Anyone tempted to romanticise theft as a poor man’s rebellion against a utility monopoly should sit with that truth first: the risk falls hardest on the very communities committing the theft.
GPL and the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation deserve credit for treating loss reduction as the emergency it is, not a line item to be managed quietly.
Eccles, Diamond Phase Three, Little Diamond and Sophia were sensible places to start, and the promise of a sustained, nationwide campaign is the right posture. But credit should not curdle into complacency, because this week’s enforcement drive addresses only the symptom. The disease is a grid running at capacity amidst a growing demand.
Consider the arithmetic GPL itself has published. National electricity consumption has nearly doubled in six years. Peak demand on the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System jumped from 221 megawatts to 242 in a single year, and planners expect it to touch roughly 266 before the season’s hottest stretch, August, September and October, when air conditioners push evening demand to its limit between 7 pm and 9 pm, is over.
The customer base has swollen by 46,000 connections since 2020, alongside a boom in housing and commercial buildings. One recovered megawatt, however welcome, is a rounding error next to the 21-megawatt jump in peak demand recorded over the past year alone.
Guyana’s power problem is not primarily that some people are stealing electricity; rather, it is that the country is growing faster than its capacity to generate, transmit and deliver the power everyone legitimately needs. With the Gas-to-Energy project and other major generation projects to come on stream soon, this problem could easily vanish with continuous planning.
That distinction should shape what comes next. If GPL treats disconnection raids as the finish line, it will win a few headlines and lose the larger war. The same pressures that pushed people onto illegal lines in the first place will simply create new illegal connections behind the crews after they leave.
This campaign must continue to be matched with investments in generation and grid resilience to ensure problems are avoided. Cutting illegal wires is necessary. It is nowhere near sufficient.
