Power thieves are not ‘forever’

By Herbert Vego

 

WHAT do you get when you steal electricity in Iloilo City?

You risk being caught and charged with power pilferage or violation of Republic Act No. 7832, punishable by prision mayor (six months and one day to six years) or a fine ranging from ten thousand pesos (P10,000) to twenty thousand pesos (P20,000) or both, at the discretion of the court.

Worse, power theft carries deadly risks. Thieves may pay with their lives.

And if you are on the same power line as someone who steals electricity, the power line could become overloaded with electric energy, which could harm your electronics and appliances designed to receive a certain steady amount of electricity.

MORE Electric and Power Corporation (MORE Power), now barely eight months in service as the new distribution utility in Iloilo City, has “inherited” from its predecessor Panay Electric Co. (PECO) at least 30,000 illegal connections using the so-called “jumpers”.

That number represents a third of the total users, counting the 65,000 paying customers as shown by MORE’s database. This means that the company has been losing millions of pesos in its first seven months of operation.

To dismantle the illegal connections and rebuild the power lines, MORE Power has upgraded its service equipment. Its latest acquisition is three brand-news laddered trucks.

Fortunately, most of the power thieves have agreed to legalize by applying for low-load metered lines.

Those caught in the act of tapping electricity direct from secondary lines have already been charged in Court.

A radio newscast that caught my attention yesterday alluded to the discovery and dismantling of 27 illegal connections with the use of alligator clips in two barangays the other day. The perpetrators have been identified for proper filing of charges.

Has nobody been convicted yet? It has been 26 since Congress passed the anti-pilferage law (RA 7832) in December 1994.

I am not aware of any conviction. But I know that  PECO had never been strict in running after the thieves. Was it because they could just charge the cost of the stolen energy to paying customers through systems loss?

The lumped system losses are normally paid by legitimate electricity users. RA 9136 or the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA) of 2001 allows the Energy Regulatory Commission to grant all private power distributors a system’s loss cap of 9.5%.  This means that only so much system’s loss could be passed on to paying customers. In excess, it’s the company’s liability, unless it manages to overcharge the paying customers.

That should explain why, in the time of PECO, hundreds or thousands of power subscribers complained to the Sangguniang Panlunsod and eventually to the House of Representatives, alleging that their usual electricity bills had ballooned by as much as 10 times. Such legitimate outcries compelled the House franchise committee to junk PECO’s application for renewal of its 25-year franchise and approved that of MORE Power.

PECO could have renewed its legislative franchise had it not abused the trust and confidence of its overbilled clientele.

Complacency and seeming indispensability must have rendered its management insensitive to clients complaining of power outages, hazardous “spaghetti wirings”, outrageous power rates, wrong meter readings, power pilferage, overbillings and poor response to complaints.

Having been in business for 96 long years, PECO had no doubt made billions of pesos in profit and therefore in no danger of losing investments made.

On the other hand, no less than MORE President Roel Castro said in a media forum that while they had already been losing millions of pesos from system’s losses beyond the ERC cap, customer satisfaction and cooperation would reverse that.