A commitment by the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) to install additional equipment to inject additional power to the national grid by this Saturday has been welcomed by the Government, although Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo still has a question mark over the commitment.

During his weekly Press conference today, Mr. Jagdeo said the Power Company continues to give his administration a headache for its inefficiency in delivering a stable power supply to the Guyanese people. 

He told reporters that he received a briefing from GPL’s management with a commitment that things will be better from this weekend. The Vice President expressed some uncertainty about that promise.

“So, they told me that hopefully by Saturday that they should be able to get most of the equipment or some of these equipment up and running again that will allow us to have capacity that maximises the peak demand. Now I am going based on what GPL is saying, because I don’t like to put my neck on the block for GPL,” the Vice President declared. 

Mr. Jagdeo said he does not want to give a definite date for the improvements in the power supply, and then disappoint citizens. He said GPL has given a commitment to work overtime to ensure that additional power is installed. 

In the meantime, the Government is locked in negotiations with a foreign company to supply emergency power here. Mr. Jagdeo said a deal could be wrapped up for that plan by this weekend.

“That will see a significant injection of power into the grid in addition to what we have. We intend to contract this for two years until the gas-to energy project is completed. So, we are hoping that within a matter of weeks we will be able to bring the situation back to normalcy and then extra capacity to address any failure of equipment that we have experienced recently,” Mr. Jagdeo noted.

Several parts of the country continue to face almost daily power outages, which has been blamed on increased demand.

GPL currently has an installed capacity of 166 Megawatts, while the current demand is over 180 megawatts.

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