With the Guyana Power and Light company facing an increase in demand for electricity, the Government wants companies that utilize a high volume of electricity to go back to self generation.
Last week, GPL announced that it has noticed a greater demand for power, with the current peak demand surpassing the usual numbers.
Over the weekend, President Ali said while efforts are underway to increase power generation, he believes companies that were not previously on the national grid have returned to the grid and that is putting a strain on the power company’s capacity.
“We want to encourage the high volume consumers to go back to self generation between 1pm and 3pm and between 6pm and 10pm, so that we will not have the outages to residential communities. If we have 15 to 20 of the large consumers self generating, during this period, that will give us back that room that will avoid the outages that we have now”, the President said in his televised statement.
While he did not name any of the high volume consumers, he said he believes many of them have turned to the national grid to take advantage of the subsidized power available from GPL. He said if those high volume consumers remain on the GPL grid, they will face an additional cost of 10 cents per killowat hour during the peak demand hours. He explained the measure will only be temporary, until GPL adds the extra 30 megawatts of new power to its grid by mid-December.
GPL Consumers have been faced with increased power outages over the past several weeks, forcing the power company to last week issue a plea for consumers to conserve on power and ensure they unplug electrical items not in use.
The power company has benefitted from increased budget allocations over the years.
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