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LCG Publishes 2024 Annual Outlook for Texas Electricity Market (ERCOT)

LCG, October 10, 2023 – LCG Consulting (LCG) has released its annual outlook of the ERCOT wholesale electricity market for 2024, based on the most likely weather, market, transmission, and generator conditions.

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LCG Publishes 2024 Annual Outlook for Texas Electricity Market (ERCOT)

LCG, October 10, 2023 – LCG Consulting (LCG) has released its annual outlook of the ERCOT wholesale electricity market for 2024, based on the most likely weather, market, transmission, and generator conditions.

Read more

Industry News

Power Theft has India's MSEB on the Ropes

LCG, Aug. 13, 2001--Huge increases in electric transmission and distribution losses, mostly accounted for by theft, has brought India's Maharashtra State Electricity Board on the verge of collapse, the Economic Times, a business newspaper reported this morning.

The paper added that government interference in preventing action against non-paying electricity customers has also contributed to MSEB's parlous condition.

The government of Maharashtra, an Indian state on the west coast of the sub-continent, appointed a committee headed by Madhav Godbole to investigate MSEB's problems. The committee has said that growing political interference in the board's affairs is also a cause of concern.

"The government's interference in the operations of MSEB has not only distorted the tariff structure, but also limited the extent of action against defaulting customers, thereby increasing the extent of receivables and bad debts," Godbole has noted in his report. "This has adversely impacted the operational efficiency of the distribution business of MSEB."

According to the Economic Times, the report says the present tariff structure is "distorted" and government intervention is responsible for it. "For political reasons, the tariffs charged to power loom, street lighting, public water works and agriculture segments has been kept at persistently low level," the report says.

The report also says that the government has directed the MSEB not to penalize non-paying consumers and not to collect charges from certain unnamed categories of customers. The latter are likely agricultural power users, who have been granted extreme leniency throughout India.

According to the report, MSEB's accounts receivable have reached an "alarmingly high level." At Dec. 31, 2000, the amount of past due electric bills totaled an astonishing 52.46 billion rupees ($11.2 billion U.S.). That sum represents about 40 percent of MSEB's annual revenues.

For the ten years up to 1992, MSEB had written off as uncollectable just 27.7 million rupees ($582 million) but in the past eight years, the board wrote off 9.36 billion rupees ($1.17 billion).

But power theft, often with the cooperation of bribed MSEB officials, is the main culprit. Transmission and distribution losses are "acknowledged" to be about 39 percent, but the report says the probability is high that an audit will reveal much higher losses.

But the audit won't be easy. The report also says that only 46 per cent of the energy consumed in the system is being metered.

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