Nigerian Government Decries High Rate of Electricity Theft

Nigerian government decries high rate of electricity theft

www.energymixreport.com...

The Federal Government has decried the rate of electricity theft in the country, describing, it as a major impediment to the growth of the energy sector.

Speaking in Kano at the inauguration of the Special Investigation and Prosecution Task Force on Electricity Offenses (SIPTCO) for Kano Electricity Zone, the Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami said that electricity theft has gone on for long in Nigeria while expressing optimism that the menace would soon be addressed

The Managing Director of KEDCO, Dr. Jamil Gwamna, said that energy theft represented a huge problem in the electricity industry while calling for stiffer punishment for offenders of energy laws.

In his view, punishment should equal the offense committed if it is to serve as a deterrent.

how much electricity theft is going on? anyone familiar with in their areas?
speaks well of Nigeria to have a 'first-world' problem like this?

I've heard of oil pipelines being tapped; this is the first time large-scale electricity theft has been on my radar.
so cheap and available most people (in my region at least) just get it hooked up legal.

illustrates the dichotomy of wealth in some places. robust power grid side by side with people too poor to afford?

also a problem in Greece

www.ekathimerini.com...

Electricity theft cost more than 260 million euros a year to consumers and continues to rise, Greece's power distribution agency DEDDIE said in a report on Wednesday.

Based on the report, electricity theft soared from 0.2 pct of distributed electricity power in 2003-2004, to 1.1 pct in 2011-2012 and to 4.2 pct in 2016, quadrupling in five years.

The introduction of stricter controls helped to slightly reduce electricity theft in 2017 (3.9 pct), but it resurged to 4.1 pct in 2018.

This represents an amount of electric power worth 260 million euros.

Greece, I think, is another country with some first-world infrastructure, side by side with some very poor people.

I wonder how many people get hurt / killed each year messing with this stuff?

and India

www.tribuneindia.com...

Electricity theft, meter-tampering and non-payment of bills by customers have been the bane of power utilities in the domain of ‘non-technical losses’. The recent late-night clampdown on the Panipat Thermal Power Station residential complex in which seven senior officials were among those caught pilfering power from streetlights underscores the shameful practice and busts the perception that theft by kundi connections is generally resorted to by consumers of congested colonies that present a shocking picture of overhead tangles of wires, leading from electricity poles to homes. Periodic raids point to the fact that such stealth is widely prevalent. Nearly one-third of the 450 chambers of the Sonepat District Courts Complex inspected by the Uttar Haryana Bijli Vitran Nigam in November were found to have illegal connections...A report published in 2018 revealed that the Indian power sector loses around $16.2 billion to theft every year.

ouch. this sort of thing adds additional burden to developing areas.
almost impossible, I would think, to stop single-household tapping of the grid. hopefully they can get whatever major offenders there are.

and Mexico

www.naturalgasintel.com...

According to the state utility Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE), the largest buyer of natural gas for electricity, more than 59 billion pesos ($3 billion) of electricity were lost to theft from June 2018 to June 2019. The company reported last month that it loses around 17,000 pesos, or $860/minute as a result of electricity theft and that it detected nearly 70,000 illegal taps in homes and businesses across the country through the first five months of 2019.

The company registered as many as 133,000 cases of electricity theft in Mexico in 2016, up from 13,000 in 2013.

I'm seeing a pattern here. Countries rich enough for infrastructure but still with lots of poor.

Bartlett said wealth disparities in Mexico are a main driver to electricity theft. While he expressed sympathy for those in “desperate and difficult situations,” a goal of this administration and the CFE is to identify and seek reimbursement from residents and businesses that steal electricity.

old Forbes article about

www.forbes.com...

“We don’t know where it all goes, but we do know the majority goes to growing marijuana.” And the thieves are not amateurs. “They tap into 12 kV or 25 kV lines. These people have utility lineman experience.” They also have a great deal of ingenuity. “We’ve seen where they hollowed out the utility poles, tapped into the power line, and then ran underground to their operation. They even put in their own transformers."

um, let's hear it for ingenuity?
one of those things where the legit uses (like me) are paying for the scofflaws.

I wonder just how widespread this is

If they didn't have that Nigerian prince trying to share their money with people online, they would not have to worry about people ripping off electricity, the money he is giving to millions of gullable people could pay everyone's light bills.

They have a problem with that in India too, it is not Nigeria. Once in a while a young guy will get electricuted trying to hook another lead to the power line in India. My daughter said there are power line leads hanging from the poles in the part of the city her room was in when she was in India studying Yoga and yoga health care. Last year she went there for six weeks, she stayed in a better area of town, it was much more normal there, the hotel even had toilet paper but still had a can you had to put the toilet paper in.

With bitcoin etc being worth a good bit of cash I'd imagine a good few people have worked out how to tap into supplies without getting caught and who goes around auditing the lines to see if someone has done a quiet bit of work to joint up a supply underground that might not be found for easy a 100 years.

Most theft above just general domestic use which doesn't really mean much for a modern house is generally for growing of weed which isn't too hard to find as the houses glow in the dark at night when its a chilly night and some elecy companies to runs now and again as they can roughly monitor production versus billing at various points like substations and see any sudden spikes especially 24x7 usage but it costs money to keep that chopper up and 99.9% of houses are fine.

There is in the UK actually loads of places with free power as during the war documentation wasn't as good as it is now and no-one can be bothered to dig up the roads to chase cables so places that have a feed like that don't normally speak up and they can't go switching them off as they may be supplies to important buildings like hospitals.

a reply to: ElGoobero

it's a big problem in the Philippines as well. you even have to pay a surcharge on your electricity bill to help cover stolen electricity. and when someone gets fried trying to illegally hook up new stories have lots of comments that basically say "good, they killed themselves". in fact there is even "pay as you go" electricity available, that lets you prepay for it. and just like with a cellphone, when the money runs out, so does your electricity. done in an attempt to stop theft. and people getting fried is not the worst of the problems caused by stolen electricity. it also causes fires, which in each case can leave hundreds homeless, and loosing everything they own (and they don't have insurance either). and the thing is we are not talking about people using that electricity to power high power usage grow ops. but to just run a couple lightbulbs, and charge cellphones, and possibly to run a fan and TV. most of them have never even had things like stoves, air conditioners, refrigerators or other high energy usage devices. i found it highly disturbing visiting a school and seeing posters and such demanding to save electricity. and to turn off the light when not there. and the like, to "save the planet". in a school where most of the kids don't even have a lightbulb to turn off. where having such a thing is a dream of something they hope to have one day.

the problem is electricity is unaffordable for many people. something that will only become worse with the push for even more expensive "green energy" production. in fact if they were to concentrate on cheap sources of electricity such as coal or gas, and bring down the price of electricity, as well as appliances to use it, they would drastically reduce smog from pollution and greenhouse gases. because then millions of people would stop doing all their cooking on cheap open wood and coal fires. which would also help people's health since that would also stop all the carbon floating around in the air. in fact many brand new houses are built with only an outside kitchen, because so many people cook on those open fires.