Latin America and the Caribbean faces major challenges in advancing toward more efficient, sustainable, resilient, and inclusive power systems. In this context, reducing electricity losses is a strategic priority for strengthening the sector’s technical and financial performance and improving service quality.
Technical losses—associated with outdated infrastructure, overloads, insufficient maintenance, or inefficient designs—and non-technical losses—linked to fraud, illegal connections, metering errors, and institutional weaknesses—reduce system efficiency, increase costs for users, and limit the investment capacity of distribution companies. They also hinder grid modernization and the integration of new technologies, distributed energy resources, and electric mobility solutions.
Reducing these losses requires comprehensive strategies combining digitalization, smart metering, infrastructure modernization, stronger commercial management, appropriate regulatory frameworks, and measures adapted to territories with high social vulnerability. Yet financing, technical capacity, regulatory, and institutional coordination gaps remain. The panel will promote regional dialogue to share experiences, good practices, regulatory approaches, and technical tools for addressing losses as a structural challenge and, at the same time, as an opportunity to strengthen governance, financial sustainability, and the region’s energy transition.
