State-owned power utility Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) has successfully cut power leakages to 13.74 percent by mid-February 2018, from 17.65 percent in mid-July 2017 in 17 distribution centres under the NEA’s Eastern Regional Office.

NEA has reduced electricity leakages in the Province No 1 by around 4 percentage point at the end of first seven months of the current fiscal year.

The regional office supplied 551 million units of electricity in the first seven months of the current fiscal year. While it sold 475.3 million units of electricity to households and industries over the period. Leaks caused a loss of around 5.7 million units of electricity.  

Biratnagar Distribution Centre has curbed losses by 4.21 percentage point to 9.84 percent from the 14.05 percent at the beginning of the fiscal year.

Duhabi Distribution Centre has also decreased losses by 3.07 percentage point to 5.88 percent. Both the distribution Center supplies electricity to large factories.

Similarly, Damak, Rangeli, Inaruwa and Belbari distribution centers has curbed the loss by 4.73, 4.12, 10.07 and 1.24 percentage points during the review period.

The power utility attributes stringent measures taken against the electricity theft and improvement in transformers and distribution lines as major reasons behind the loss reduction.

NEA Managing Director Kulman Ghising said, “While theft control has curbed non-technical loss of electricity, the replacement of old transformers has reduced technical loss. We will keep on prioritising loss control in coming days too.”

Currently, Ghising seeks active role of local representatives in controlling electricity leakages by helping the NEA in controlling electricity theft. Kankai Municipality of Jhapa district strongly supports NEA’s crusade to stop electricity leakages by declaring their municipality ‘electricity leakage free area’. 

The NEA’s Eastern Region Office Chief Sachinananda Yadav said controlling electricity leakage in summer would be more challenging. “We have achieved our target for the first seven months of the fiscal year, but it will be a big challenge to control the technical loss during summer when the demand for electricity is higher than what our distribution system can support,” said Yadav. “Nevertheless, we will try to meet the given target.” The regional office has to maintain the electricity loss at 14 percent by the end of this fiscal year.   

The NEA’s distribution lost 22.90 percent of its total power output at the end of the last fiscal year, most of it because of theft. The power utility is planning to bring down the leakages to 20 percent by the end of this fiscal year.