The Guyana Power and Light has announced that it will be removing large industrial customers from its grid between 6pm and 10pm daily in a bid to stabilize power supply, which has been causing headache for the power company.

While the company has not indicated the total number of high usage customers that will likely be affected, it believes that the ease on the national grid during peak periods will allow residential and smaller customers to have a more stable power supply.

Sections of the country have been gripped by repeated power outages over the last two weeks, with some areas facing outages of more than six hours.

On Saturday, President Irfaan Ali addressed the issue and explained that the Power company wants large consumers to voluntarily remove themselves from the GPL grid during peak periods.

In a statement today, the Power Company said it has recorded an unprecedented peak demand of approximately 182 megawatts which has presented a challenge for the company’s current available generation capacity.

The company said to remedy the situation and avoid widespread service disruptions, it contacted its large industrial customers that have self-generating capacity and requested that they self-generate during the peak demand hours.

However, only a handful of customers responded to GPL’s request, the company said.

“Regrettably, only a small percentage of these customers responded positively. This partial response has necessitated the need for GPL to proceed to remove these customers from the grid between 18;00hrs and 22;00hrs daily,” GPL said.

The power company said its move is a temporary one, but necessary to prevent service disruptions.

The Opposition has called out the Government over the widespread outages and said mismanagement at both the company and the Ministry of Works is to be blamed for the current power woes.

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