The consultant for the Commonwealth Public Utilities Commission has recommended for the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. to reinstitute its taskforce dealing with unaccounted for energy and submit a status report regarding the \u201cextraordinarily large\u201d percentage of power losses in the CNMI. <\/p>\n
In his presentation at the CPUC hearing last week, Georgetown Consulting Group, Inc.\u2019s Larry Gawlik said that a report and plan must be made to identify losses, remediation efforts, costs of remediation, and schedule for the remediation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe recommend that CUC perform a meaningful status report, consider reinstituting the ad-hoc unaccounted for energy taskforce that it put together for the purposes of determining these losses and developing a plan,\u201d Gawlik said.<\/p>\n
In addressing this issue, Gawlik said \u201cIt represents probably the single largest opportunity for CUC to improve its efficiency with regards to delivery of power. It is a larger opportunity than building new power plants.\u201d <\/p>\n
In simple terms, Gawlik described unaccounted for energy as \u201cenergy produced at the power plant but for some reason never makes it to the customer\u2019s bills.\u201d<\/p>\n
Power produced minus energy sold equals unaccounted for energy. <\/p>\n
These losses can be technical or line losses which are caused by wires, physical lines, transformers, or other infrastructure part of the distribution and therefore can be estimated accurately and can be controlled.<\/p>\n
Non-technical losses, on the other hand, are those that result from factors such as inaccurate meter, meter reading error, transformation error, incorrect meter multiplier in the billing, theft, and others.<\/p>\n
Gawlik noted that since 2012\u2014when CPUC ordered CUC to implement the recommendations in the Pacific Power Association\u2019s 2010 KEMA study for reducing CUC\u2019s unaccounted for energy losses to industry norms\u2014they have received only one status report from the corporation.<\/p>\n
No change since 2010<\/strong><\/p>\n Gawlik stated that CUC is basically the same as it was when KEMA made its analysis six years ago.<\/p>\n He stated that losses on Saipan were pegged at 14.85 percent, 19.29 percent for Tinian, and 19.63 percent for Rota. <\/p>\n Gawlik said that these are \u201cextraordinarily large numbers\u201d particularly when normal technical losses is 8 percent.<\/p>\n This means, Gawlik said, that 7 or 8 percent of the losses are non-technical losses\u2014which, by industry standard, should be less than 1 percent.<\/p>\n \u201cSomebody has to pay for all these losses,\u201d Gawlik said.<\/p>\n \u201cBoth losses are paid for by customers,\u201d he added, noting that these losses find their way to customer billings in the way the fuel adjustment charges are calculated and the way rates are calculated.<\/p>\n Gawlik said that these losses\u2014paid for by electric ratepayers\u2014are worth conservatively $3 million to closer to $5 million a year in current fuel costs or may have amounted to $8 million \u201cduring the hyper fuel costs two years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n Not acceptable<\/strong><\/p>\n In their response, CUC management said they don\u2019t need to be tasked in addressing this issue as they have been making efforts to do so.<\/p>\n \u201cWe continue to review and make efforts to identify losses,\u201d CUC acting executive director Gary Camacho said.<\/p>\n He acknowledged that the numbers are \u201cvery high\u201d and that it is \u201cnot acceptable to CUC.\u201d He also said that they \u201cunderstand the responsibility\u201d of CUC regarding the matter.<\/p>\n During the restoration efforts after Typhoon Soudelor, CUC noted that they have made efforts to review their transformers and \u201ctry to size them along the way\u201d as a way of addressing losses. They have replaced 600 to 700 transformers after Soudelor.<\/p>\n CUC said it will be more than happy to comply with Georgetown\u2019s recommendations to put together a team and make a written report by September.<\/p>\n \u201cI think we should be able to have most of it by September if not all but if possible if I need another month, hopefully they consider my request if that is possible,\u201d Camacho said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The consultant for the Commonwealth Public Utilities Commission has recommended for the Commonwealth Utilities Corp….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[900],"tags":[915,49,11424,11425],"class_list":["post-227339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","tag-cpuc","tag-cuc","tag-kema","tag-pacific-power-association"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227339"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227339\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}