Indonesia's PLN urged to cut power loss

The Indonesian government urged PLN to reduce electricity losses and increase the country’s electrification ratio.

Deputy Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry Rudi Rubiandini said that the government expected PLN to trim electricity losses to 8.5 percent by 2013.

“It [the decrease] is needed for efficiency reasons. If PLN cannot do that, then its revenues will be automatically cut as well as its dividends,” he said.

“Last year, PLN’s electricity losses rate was 9.44 percent out of 156.29 terawatt hours of electricity that the company sold. If the company could decrease the losses to 8.9 percent this year, I think they could reach the 8.5 percent target in 2013,” he added.

But PLN planning and risk management director Murtaqi Syamsuddin said that the 9.4 percent in electricity losses last year was an indication that the company had performed quite well because it is responsible for a vast area.

“Reducing electricity losses to 8.5 percent means we need more investment,” he said. A 1 percent decrease in the rate of electricity loss required an investment of Rp 1.5 trillion, he went on. He said the company’s operational funds could not cover some maintenance work and PLN would need to strengthen its grid network capacity and add more transformers, which were not cheap.

“Now we should [choose] between placing a priority on increasing our electrification ratio so that people in remote areas can enjoy electricity or boosting our performance by decreasing electricity losses,” he said.

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