Cleaning Up Cables
How USAID is making electricity safer and more reliable with aerial bundled cables
Energy powers our world. It turns on equipment in hospitals, provides light to schools, and preserves food in refrigerators.
But energy also has the power to do serious damage if it is not handled or used properly.
Live wires that carry electricity are dangerous when left exposed and not properly insulated. These wires can shock and electrocute people. This is especially true during storms and high winds when electricity can “leak” into walls and poles, and people and animals can be electrocuted just by touching these surfaces.
Around the world, people can illegally tamper with electrical wires in order to steal electricity. For example — in Pakistan, people use kunda “wire hook” connections, which are wires that illegally hook directly onto the distribution cables that bring energy to homes and businesses. The kunda system transforms a neat distribution line into a mess of loose and tangled wires, creating a severe hazard for the people who live in the community.
In Multan, Pakistan — a city of about two million people — the kunda system has historically caused many problems.
Qasim, a man who lives in the city, said, “There were accidents due to tangled electricity wires. In the past, damaged electrical cables would often fall down on children and elderly people, and it caused many deaths.”
Not only is electricity theft from kunda connections a health hazard, but it also impacts the reliability of power supply for the country. In the areas with high electricity theft rates, distribution companies resort to load shedding in order to reduce their revenue losses. Load shedding occurs when there is a deliberate shutdown of parts of the power distribution system, which causes blackouts for the consumer.
The paying customers lose in this scenario, because they receive insufficient power supply, and the national government picks up the bill for the stolen electricity, which adds to Pakistan’s staggering national debt. According to a study completed by USAID, the national cost of load shedding is $14 billion per year.
USAID worked with the Multan Electric Power Company (MEPCO) to make communities safer and prevent electricity theft by stymying the use of illegal kunda wire hooks. Together, USAID and MEPCO installed aerial bundled cables (ABC), which insulate live wires and are impossible to steal from with kunda wire hooks.
The result is a neater transmission line, fewer electrocutions, and reduced electricity theft. And because the original project to install ABCs was so beneficial to the city of Multan, other distribution companies have replicated the installation into other cities in Pakistan such as Peshawar.
With less electricity theft, energy distribution companies are more profitable and need to impose less load shedding.
Qasim said that in Multan, there used to be six to eight hours of electricity blackouts due to load shedding per day — but now, with the ABC, the city only experiences about one hour of load shedding per day, which is a decrease of more than 85%.
USAID’s work to modernize the energy sector in Pakistan leads to more reliable electricity access for the customer and better outcomes for the institutions that provide energy. And in the case of the ABC — this innovation creates a safer and more habitable environment to live in, too.
The ABC installation in Multan is just one part of USAID’s broader efforts to modernize Pakistan’s energy sector.
In the last 10 years, USAID has introduced several new technologies in Pakistan like smart meters, new software and tools, and job training to Pakistanis. These technologies and other USAID programs are helping Pakistan meet its Nationally Determined Contributions under the UN and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030.
Learn more about USAID’s work in the energy sector.
About the Author
Ali Syverson is a Communications and Knowledge Management Specialist for the Center for Energy, Infrastructure and Cities at USAID.
