With a 36-megawatt power ship connected to the national grid to boost the Guyana Power and Light’s General capacity and the recent purchase of several generating sets, frequent blackouts have returned and Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo has expressed his concern over the problem.

While GPL has blamed the recent outages on a number of issues including pile driving and construction activities, Mr. Jagdeo today said the issue is also one of generation capacity, old transmission lines and the management at the power company.

He said with some roadworks ongoing, GPL has also relayed that moving of the lines also disrupts the system.

“So, they are telling me that when they move some of these lines, it is causing instability in the system or they have to take off the power to move a bit of the line. So, some of that is happening, some of it is the old system and some frankly speaking we are not happy with the management too, look at what’s going on. So, its a combination of factors and it bothers me a lot personally,” Jagdeo declared. 

However, Mr. Jagdeo said the Government is acknowledging that the issues of GPL need fixing, but said while fixing the company might not happen overnight, the Government will be making several interventions, including the much hyped, gas-to-energy project.

“The demand now has skyrocketed, because with all the new hotels, housing schemes and air conditioning and massive investments right across Guyama, the demand has skyrocketed, and even for people who have higher income now, many of them are putting in AC’s and so in their homes so, we are in mad rush to keep pace until that big project comes on stream next year that will put 300 MW into the system,” Mr. Jagdeo said.

Mr. Jagdeo said the Government is also building a transmission network to take the additional power. He said administration plans to construct new substations to take off power from the main grid, so that if there is an outage in one area, it will not affect other areas.

“So, it is a concern to me, but sometimes you just have to dig down and work at solving it, and the only way it could be solved is the path we have going forward with modern electricity grid and cheap cost fuel to supply more power to the system so that we can reduce the price by 50% and that is going to happen, people are going to have reliable power because of the investments we are making and they will save 50% of their electricity bill and that is going to happen,” Mr. Jagdeo promised.

According to the Vice President, with the massive development taking place across the country, the Government is in a rush to supply stable energy.

The power problems at GPL have been ongoing for several years.

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