body,td,th { font-family: Arial; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; }
Tonight, BEL is warning customers that its power supply is unstable and you should be prepared for the possibility of outages. The problem is the weather which the company calls "Unprecedentedly hot and humid weather interspersed with isolated lightning and thunderstorms."
The humid weather is causing record high levels of usage and the lightning is playing havoc with some very vulnerable transmission lines.
Add to that the fact that the Blair Athol Power Company Limited in Placencia has gone offline for urgent maintenance - and BEL has a major capacity problem.
This morning, the company's General Manager of Energy Supply & Transmission spoke to the media in a virtual press conference:
Jose Moreno, General Manager,Energy Supply and Transmission
"You know, our system is in a present state of voulnerability that we have never seen before and that and to assure the customers that you know if there's any brief interruption of power that BEL has put in place contingency measures to make sure that we restore it as soon as possible. There's no conditions that are really putting some a little bit of concern on our part, which is the vulnerability of the transmission line that connects us to Mexico and the shortfall in generation, in-country generation."
"In the north, we have a situation where we have already started doing maintenance work on that line. And because we interrupted that flow of supply, we were depending almost 90% on in-country resources. And then we had this situation with one of our biggest plants in the South, and because of that, we had to pull back those works."
"With the recent storms and the change in weather that is happening right now, we're a little bit concerned that the voulnerability of that line can cause the system to collapse. As we have seen a couple of times already. I know that normally our customers are not used to having, you know, so frequent interruptions and we don't want them to think that, you know, the sky is falling."
"Our main message is, you know, just be prepared, be listen, you know, we have taken steps to mitigate those conditions, and that if they can assist us in managing the peak demand, especially during the afternoon hours, you know, that will be going along way. Our peak demand doesn't happen during April when the temperatures are high. It happens now when the humidity starts to rise."
"So it takes a little more. You mean if you stand in front of the fan, it doesn't call you as quickly as, you know, if we had a dry, hot day and because it is driven by humidity. So we are asking, you know, we are not telling customers, stop from doing what you need to do. You need to open your business. You need to continue doing your business. What we ask is, you know, if your kids are watching TV and they leave the room, stop the TV stop the fan because at the end of the day, all of those little activities add up and do make an impact on the demand that we are seeing."
