These days, there has been a lot less load shedding than we saw a month ago. And on top of that, the June rains are slowly coming down. However, it's not enough to fill the BECOL reservoirs and the state of Belize's electricity supply is still not stable. In fact, today BEL's chairman described it as "precarious." One of the reasons for that is that the gas turbine in San Pedro, which was to come on stream mid-June, is experiencing major difficulties. Here's how he explained it.
Andrew Marshalleck, Chairman, BEL
"There's been some delays again. One of the transformers, I understand when it was energized, it failed, it exploded or something, it needs to be dealt with, so it'll set us back."
Reporter:
"How long?"
Andrew Marshalleck, Chairman, BEL
"I don't know. You see you talk about energy independence, but there's no independence. You have to get that equipment, buy it, send it in, hook it up."
Reporter:
"So we're still in a precarious position for the next few weeks."
Andrew Marshalleck, Chairman, BEL
"I think you're in a precarious position through July… June, July. It has to be managed very closely, but I think we've been managing."
"What I mean is that the available capacity is very close to what the system is demanding so that the possibility of something going wrong and falling short is real. That's what I mean by precarious. The way you solve that is you need more capacity because you need redundancy. You need capacity sitting in waiting for in one field you turn the other went on to fix it, and the supply isn't disrupted. We don't have that. We barely have enough to meet demand. And that'll be so until the reservoirs are flush with water again, maybe about September with the rains."
Courtney Menzies:
"So if we don't get a lot of rain right now, how long more do we have before the reservoir is empty?"
Andrew Marshalleck, Chairman, BEL
"Well, we've been managing it because we know the reservoirs are low. We try not to use the dams for power. It's only if something else cuts off, then we will turn it on and then it uses the water."
