The Jamaica Public Service Company in a release earlier this week said it would be spending more than $800 million to c****at electricity theft this year.

The company said most of the funds will be used in the expansion of projects such as the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) project, and the creation of Theft Resistant Networks, both aimed at eliminating the losses associated with the crime.

In the release, the company said it began deploying its AMI smart meters among large commercial and industrial customers, who account for approximately 50 per cent of all energy consumption served by the company last year. It continued that these meters provided "increased billing efficiency, better demand management - more timely power-outage detection and restoration." The meters are said to also make the job of detecting meter tampering easier.

More than two-thirds of the company's 7,000 large commercial and industrial customers will have had AMI smart meters installed by the end of 2009. The others will be provided with the AMI meters by December 2010.

The release said that theft-resistant networks were being implemented in an effort to address the problem of losses among residential customers.

The network involves the replacement of power lines with insulated conductors, which makes it more difficult for persons to throw up illegal lines to connect to the electricity grid.