B.E.L Addressing Illegal Connection Loses

B.E.L. loses thousands of dollars in revenue annually due to illegal connections. The company says it is prepared to regularize households that are connected to the grid illegally. However, a lack of proper distribution infrastructures, such as roadways, in some of these areas presents the greatest challenge. Fuller says B.E.L is now working with local and national entities to address these inadequacies.

Sean Fuller

Sean Fuller, General Manager, Commercial and Retail Service B.E.L

“From a very high level, eleven and a half percent loses annually. That includes both technical loses what we refer to as commercial loses. About seven percent I believe of that eleven and a half percent is considered technical loses, where w, it is the system loses associated with the transmission of energy from the independent power producers to the customer. It is a natural technical loses based on distance, temperature that the system will see. Here is quite a bit of what we refer to as commercial loses. We have a team specifically addressing those commercial loses that do inspection of customer installations. But, to speak directly to your thoughts on those communities that we are not able to serve with the right infrastructure. There are some that we can call in Belize City, Kungulung, the Krooman Lagoon Area, and these areas we are not able to go in and build our distribution infrastructure because we require established road ways, a right of way, and utility corridor to be able to run our infrastructure. So, we are working very diligently to work with both our local and national bodies to be able to regularize these situations by looking at how best we can go in there and install our infrastructure to be able to serve these customers the right way. We know these customers still pay for electricity. They may not pay BEL but they pay someone for that wire that hangs off the pole. So these customers want to pay for their electricity that they use.”