EVERY time GPL or GWI urges Guyanese to switch off unused lights, take shorter showers, or fix a dripping tap, a familiar chorus erupts online: ridicule, sarcasm, the claim that a country “sitting on oil” has no business asking citizens to ration water or watts. It’s a satisfying punchline. It’s also, on the facts, asinine.

Oil revenue did not repeal physics. Some of the world’s richest economies conserve constantly. In 2022, Germany, France, Luxembourg and a dozen other EU states, among the wealthiest societies on Earth, ran national campaigns for shorter showers, lower thermostats and dimmed landmarks (Paris darkened the Eiffel Tower nightly) once gas supplies tightened; Brussels mandated a five per cent cut in peak electricity use bloc-wide.

Singapore, one of the richest nations on Earth per capita, has run public water-saving campaigns for decades because it imports much of what it drinks. None of these places is poor. All of them, at points, had more demand than supply, and treated conservation as ordinary citizenship, not confession of poverty.

Guyana’s own grid tells the same story. Peak demand on the interconnected system has nearly doubled since 2020, from about 125MW to a record 242.6MW, as new customers, hotter seasons and a construction boom outpace how fast even well-funded capacity can be engineered, permitted and connected.

The Natural Resource Fund can accelerate that build-out; it cannot make a new power plant or reservoir appear overnight. Shifting a few appliances off the 7-9pm peak, or reaching for a bucket instead of a hose, buys the system room to breathe while the harder work continues. That is systems management, not poverty.

And that harder work is under way. The government has committed roughly US$800 million to modernising GPL’s transmission and distribution network. The GUYSOL programme — an US$83.3 million Guyana/Norway partnership delivered through the IDB — is building eight solar farms across four regions for 33 megawatts.

More than 37,000 hinterland households now run on solar home systems, part of a push towards nearly 50MW of off-grid renewable capacity, alongside the 165MW Amaila Falls hydro project and a stated goal of roughly 70% renewable generation under the Low Carbon Development Strategy.

This is a government spending oil revenue specifically to shrink the need for conservation appeals over time, while being honest that the transition takes years, not press conferences.

However, citizens conserving in good faith deserve a utility that conserves effort too, and lower bills to show for both. Skepticism about accountability is entirely fair; skepticism about basic physics is not.

Oil has given Guyana options it lacked a decade ago. It has not exempted the country from scarcity. Every rich nation mocked for “still needing to save” has, at some point, asked its own citizens to do exactly that. Guyana joining that list isn’t an embarrassment, it’s what responsible, growing nations do.