President Dr Irfaan Ali has announced maintenance plans for 2025 to address the Guyana Power and Light’s (GPL) ageing infrastructure, including critical repairs on 18 overdue generators while maintaining the country’s power supply.

During an end-of-year press conference at State House on Tuesday, President Ali noted that GPL’s generation availability has increased from 207 megawatts to 267 megawatts following the commissioning of a second power ship on December 23.

“The current demand is approximately 119 megawatts, with peaks of 205 megawatts recorded in October and November,” the President said while also acknowledging the pressing maintenance issues facing GPL’s generators.

“Several generators that constitute these 267 megawatts have exceeded their scheduled major overhauls…We keep saying that there was no maintenance programme, many of the existing generators that are in the system, they have gone past their time for overhaul because we did not have the capacity in the system to pull them down…Frankly speaking, they can go down anytime, because they’re all past their maintenance period” he said.

To address this challenge, President Ali said that the government has devised a plan to stagger the maintenance of these generators in 2025.

“18 generators representing 115 megawatts of installed capacity require urgent maintenance since the second half of 2024… These generators are operating below capacity, posing high risk for failure, so we have to slowly take these generators out now, because we have this capacity now, so we can have them maintain and place back into the system,” he said.

President Ali also provided details on the recent outages experienced by GPL, stating that since the addition of the new power ship, there have been eight outages resulting in 10.13 hours of inconvenience.

He attributed these outages to various issues, including damaged transformers, broken insulators, and vehicle collisions with power poles.
The President highlighted that aging infrastructure remains a primary issue, one that was neglected under the previous A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) government.

Looking ahead, the President outlined GPL’s major investment plan for 2025, which includes the construction of approximately 155 kilometres of double-circuit transmission lines, 214 kilometres of 69 kV transmission lines, and 343 kilometres of distribution lines across Regions 3,4,5,6.

“The other big issue that we have at GPL, that we must address is a transmission and distribution. So, there is a major plan in 2025 to address the transmission and distribution system. And this would be an investment, maybe, of in excess of US$750 million,” he said.
The plan also involves the construction of new substations and the upgrade of existing ones, as well as the installation of a battery energy storage system.

President Ali reaffirmed the importance of these investments in ensuring reliable and efficient power supply, which is crucial for attracting new industries and supporting Guyana’s economic growth.