Delhi took 25 years to cut its grid losses from about 50% to 5%

The World Bank share counts only countries that track losses at all ^[1], and the loss it counts has two parts. Some electricity leaves the wires as heat. Some is taken by thieves or used by customers who never pay ^[2]. Nobody gets to use energy lost as heat. Stolen power is still consumed. Stopping theft therefore returns revenue to the utility first, and it frees generation only where consumption falls once people are billed for it.

The effect in Delhi is large under either kind of loss. A grid losing half its output must generate two units for every unit that reaches a paying customer. At 5 percent it needs about 1.05 ^[3]. With generation held fixed, the same plants now serve about 1.9 times as much billed demand ^[2]. The account does not split Delhi's 45-point fall ^[1] between heat and theft, and it does not put a cost on the programme. So 1.9 is the upper bound on new supply, and it is reached only if every recovered point was a physical loss.

It is also one city's record, with no comparison grid run alongside it and no single intervention to credit. Spectrum says no one technology solves the problem. It lists what Delhi did: it updated equipment across entire networks, got several arms of government to agree to reforms, wrote or revised regulations, invested, and changed working cultures ^[12].

The grids that went the other way point to maintenance and metering. Argentina's transmission and distribution companies lacked the capital to maintain and upgrade their networks, which left equipment operating under stress, Spectrum reports ^[7]. A delay in installing smart meters made it easier for thieves to siphon power and tamper with meters ^[7]. Jamaica, where theft is rampant, has sat between 21 and 28 percent for years ^[8]. As a general pattern, Spectrum writes, the less maintained a grid is, the more power it loses, and the more fragile the local law enforcement and government, the more theft there is ^[15].

I think the evidence supports a narrow form of the case for loss reduction as a source of supply. Losses above 10 percent can come down a long way, and every recovered point is electricity that was generated and then lost ^[2]. Thomas is an electrical engineer at Jamia Millia Islamia and has lived in Delhi since the 1990s ^[4]. She names the condition. Copying Delhi "requires a concerted effort from all stakeholders, customers, the utility, the government, and their employees," she said ^[13].