Electricidade de Moçambique (EDM) has been registering power losses for technical reasons linked to the inefficiency of the transmission and distribution infrastructures, and also because of human action with emphasis on meter tampering, customer debts and clandestine connections.

In the first three months of this year alone, the company lost energy to the tune of 29%, an estimated $42 million, down by 2 percentage points from its peak in December last year.

Similarly, during the whole of last year, 2020, power losses injured the company by about 100 million dollars. To mitigate this evil, from January to April this year the company carried out 230,000 inspections that resulted in the recovery of 200 million Meticals, 160 million of which were in the installations of domestic, commercial, social consumers of the agricultural tariff and forty million of high profile customers connected to high and medium voltage lines.

In an interview to the weekly "domingo", the Director of Revenue Protection and Loss Control, Amilton Alissone, explained that technical losses represent about eight percent of the overall losses that, although controllable, are unavoidable.

"Technically reaching a situation where we have technical losses equal to zero is impossible and minimizing them requires heavy investment," he said. The impossibility of avoiding technical losses stems from the fact that transmission, power conversion, and current distribution equipment by themselves are natural focuses of energy losses.