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Formerly known as BECOL, later rebranded as Fortis Belize, in 2001 the company signed a contract with BEL to sell them all the electricity they generated up until the year 2051.
Recently, the Prime Minister has publicly complained about annual increases:
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"You know what Fortis needs to talk is about starting to reduce the price of energy that they sell to Belize. Unfortunately, when we signed that agreement, it has a clause that the price goes up. I think it's every year by a small percentage. So that price continues to go up instead of going down. So Fortis needs to come to Belize and Fortis needs to negotiate how we can bring on the price, that's the first thing."
And he didn't mention that the increases come even though they get the use of the water from the Macal river for free!
CEO Kay Menzies responded today:
Kay Menzies, CEO, Fortis Belize
"We do a fair amount of maintenance every year, spare parts don't stay the same price. My team is not working for the same, I can't expect these guys to work for the same wage that they were working for back in 2010 when Vaca was commissioned, they need a raise every year. And you know, the cost of operating it. I think after what you've seen today this is not just water passing through and going freely there's a lot of intensive maintenance. At Mollejon we just took down an entire turbine and repaired a significant amount of it and this is something that we do every year that we are always investing in our equipment because again if you're going to do a 50 year investment you just can't leave the machines to run themselves for 50 years you have to maintain them and upgrade them as well. So the cybersecurity upgrades the operating software upgrades, the turbines themselves and the fact we do a fair amount of research to figure out how we can upgrade for additional efficiency which has a cost as well so there is never. That's why I was saying the difference between this and solar is, solar you put up the panels you put up the inverters once in a while you'll have a software update for the inverters and you will have cleaning of the panels and cleaning of the area this kind of thing. This is much more intensive and we end up spending quite a bit of money every year and of course I mean you are a business and you do want to deliver something to the owner and the owners are investors on pension funds and so on and so forth but the beginning of this process is you want that structure to remain in tact and for those turbines to deliver the power you expect for the full 50 years of the contract life and there are no excuses if you don't."
