–President Ali announces; says no effort will be spared to address issues of power supply
–Cuban engineers to help address GPL’s technical deficit, massive overhaul of transmission, distribution lines on the cards

THE Government of Guyana on Friday finalised an agreement for the supply of “emergency power” to address the increase of power outages.
During a live broadcast statement on his official Facebook Page, President Dr. Irfaan Ali revealed that the government, through the Guyana Power and Light Inc (GPL), finalised a time-charted agreement with UCC holding for a “power ship” to be deployed to the country within three weeks.

“This arrangement will bring an additional 36 megawatts of power to the national grid to offset generation shortfalls,” Dr. Ali said.
The agreement will see the chartering of a power supply vessel that will be connected to GPL’s Demerara-Berbice Integrated System at Everton in Berbice, providing support to the generation capacity of the power company. The vessel will be in the country for a period of 24 months.

“This power arrangement is being optioned at a very competitive cost; it will cover the charter cost of the vessel, including its generating engines as well as operations and maintenance cost,” the President said.
While this comes on stream, the government is still faced with a host of challenges, which it is working to address.
In 2020, the government inherited a system that lacked maintenance. Resources, the President lamented, were not expended on the transmission for the projected increase in demand for electricity supply.

Notwithstanding the challenges, the government confronted the issue, and had commenced work to expand and enhance the capacity of the country’s sole electricity provider.
He said while upgrades were necessary, the government was only “catching up” to the growing demand of the country.

Dr. Ali said: “We confronted the challenges and worked assiduously on expanding the system, enhancing the capacity of the system, building out sub-stations, building out a network, enhancing the main transmission line [and] creating some amount of redundancy.”
In addition to the challenges surrounding low maintenances and aged equipment, GPL is also facing a skill deficit at the technical level.
“We have already started to plan to confront the growth, because, as we move towards the reduction in the cost of energy, more entities that are self-generating now will migrate to the grid, and we now have to work on ensuring that projection; that growth is taken into account,” the Head of State said.

The government, he added, is assessing its management capability, and is working on strengthening its management capacity.
To this end, he revealed that there will be a massive overhaul of the power company’s distribution and transmission lines.
“We have started a lot of that work, but there is tremendous investment that is required in the transmission lines across the network; that is why we are already in discussion with stakeholders to see how we could accelerate the investments,” Dr. Ali related.

Work will also be done on “line losses”, both from the technical and non-technical aspects, which includes addressing the stealing of electricity.
While the emergency power is being supplied, simultaneously, the government will work to supply 60 megawatts to support the growing demand, and what will be the outcome of reducing the country’s electricity cost.

He highlighted that while the government is actively pursuing its gas-to-energy project to supply around 300 megawatts of power, additional power will be needed.
“We are also thinking ahead as to whether additional gas will be required to have a second gas plant; to have an expanded generating capacity. The task is ours; [it] fell on the PPP/C to fix broken things and make it work and rebuild things.

“The government is taking ownership. We understand, yes, there are issues that we are dealing with at GPL, and we are working on the technical issues; the capacity and capability issue, but the government is making the investment to make it better,” the Head of State affirmed.
The previous APNU+AFC government, President Ali said, failed to address the dire issues at the GPL during their tenure in government.

The ‘slothfulness’ in the lack of maintenance and investments has left the current government now addressing challenges, and looking to enhance the capacity of the power company for the future.

Meanwhile, to address the technical capacity of GPL, the government plans to recruit an additional 10 engineers to ensure adequate maintenance and reliability in the system.
“We have gone out many times to procure the services of Guyanese, engineers and we have not been successful, because of the demand for engineers in other areas… I have just concluded meetings with the Cuban ambassador, they have very skilled technical personnel who they are willing to deploy immediately to work in the system to help us technically,” President Ali said.