On Friday's news, we told you about the national power outage that outage happened at around 4 p.m. and lasted for almost two hours in some areas. According to BEL, it was due to a fault at CFE power in Mexico.
The outage has provided a platform for BEL to start sensitizing Belizeans about their plans for energy stability, and hopefully a reduction in the cost of power, despite the soaring prices for oil on the international market.
The company says that while they have had excellent relations with Mexico's CFE, BEL thinks that is time that the country starts to make meaningful steps toward energy independence. The company wants to start charting a way forward in which more of the power's grid needs are met by local sources of power.
They hosted a 1-hour press conference to make that point, but here's how they placed Friday's blackout into perspective, and why this could become a recurrent problem:
Karique Marin - Manager, Distribution Planning & Engineering, BEL
"BEL lost supply from CFE at approximately 3:55 p.m., due to a fault on the Yucatan grid. The dispatch profile at the time comprised CFE, BECOL, BELCOGEN, Santander, and BAPCOL. At the time of the incident, approximately the 56% of energy to BEL customers was supplied by CFE, which was the maximum possible, as the prices from CFE are currently competitive, and we're conserving water resources by limiting the use of the hydro plants as we are currently in a drought projection. What is important to understand is for a stable grid, the energy demand must match the energy supply. And when we lost the Mexican connection, the system responded as it should, by shedding demand to match the supply available in-country. We had areas in Cayo, Stand Creek, and Toledo, which remained with power from our local suppliers. We did, however, later on, suffer a total power outage for the entire country as our local IPPs were unable to support the demand of these areas that remained online. All the local IPPs were highly responsive during this critical time. When the grid collapsed, that was during the restoration process, and as mentioned, we did not have as much local supply to match the load. So, we did lose the entire grid. The restoration took a bit longer than we intended as we had some issues with the Vaca hydro plant and the gas turbine. Typically, we aim for about an hour and a half restoration time, however, this process did take two and a half hours for most areas. But, the system was restored before we reconnected at the CFE. So, what happened was we brought on local supply that was then synchronized to the grid, and then re-energized most customers within that two and a half hours. Learning from this incident, however, BEL and its IPPs will make adjustments to restore as quickly as possible for any future event."
BEL notes that they were able to fully restore electricity using local sources before power from Mexico was restored.
