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And now to news of Belize's chronically unstable power supply.
In their press conference at the beginning of May, BEL executives told the public that by the end of May, once the Westlake gas turbine is up and running along with a new gas turbine in San Pedro, there would be no need for load shedding.
But the end of May is here and that San Pedro gas turbine is "not ready yet". The operational date for that has been extended to mid June.
And so, all bets are off and load shedding is back on. BEL has been releasing tentative load shedding schedules almost every day. Today's load shedding includes feeders in Ladyville, Belize City, Belmopan, San Ignacio, Corozal, Orange walk and even all the way down to Dangriga and Independence. So what's the problem now? BEL held a media luncheon today and explained the various stress point on a grid that's being pushed to the limit:
Dawn Sampson-Nunez, General Manager, Employee & Corporate services
"A number of the outages that would have been experienced, I believe in particular up north, is a result of the weather. There is damage to the infrastructure when that occurs. There are issues with respect to being able to take energies from CFE. And of course, being able to then do some readjustments to ensure that we can meet the demand on the other side of wherever that damage occurs on the transmission line. In a nutshell, what I want to say is that if you'll allow me to just repeat that part right. The challenge here is weather related damages to the transmission system. And as a result, we then need to source more energy from the hydroelectric facilities. Right. That then is causing a reduction in the water levels at the hydro facilities. And so that's a situation that we need to manage going forward. The other challenge has to do with BELCOGEN That's another important independent power producer. The issue is that they have notified us, I believe just a few days ago that there is a problem with one of the motors."
"The other challenge that we are dealing with here is BELCOGEN. BELCOGEN has notified us that they're experiencing some technical difficulties with their infrastructure. They have indicated to us that they should be off line for about two weeks. So that's one challenge that we're managing there. BAPCOL as well. They have notified us as well that they need to carry out some very urgent maintenance repairs on their machines. We currently get about I think it's about 22 megawatts from from BAPCOL There are three machines that supply us with power from BAPCOL. They will be taking out one unit at the time. So each time they take over a unit its about two days that they've indicated to us they will need to be offline. So again, we're managing the situation at the situation at BAPCOL. The situation with BELCOGEN they expect to be out for about two weeks.It is possible that they can come back before as well. It might take a little longer. We're managing the weather related outages, the impact that it's having on our transmission system. So in a in a nutshell, where we are at this point in time is that there may be the need for load shedding from time to time."
