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Reliable electricity supply paramount for business growth
– visiting French Professor
France-based Guyanese, Professor and Electrical Engineer, Joseph Farley, has said that a good electricity supply is paramount if Guyana wishes to progress with businesses.
The specialist, who is currently in Guyana and doing work with the University of Guyana Berbice and Turkeyen Campuses, stated that no one in the business world would tolerate employing large numbers of people and have them “sit idle for four hours” during a blackout.
Prof Joseph Farley
Over the past couple of weeks, there has been an upsurge in blackouts. Berbice is being hit hard by rolling blackouts on a daily basis. Already, GPL has tipped 200 blackouts for the year, and this certainly does not auger well for the power utility company. Berbicians are furious.
Prof Farley, who is staying in Rose Hall Town, said that one day he had a blackout in the town for more than four hours. “When you have a hundred employees or more sitting around, waiting for current to come on, this is a loss of productivity. So big businesses, if they were thinking of coming into South America, would look at your resources and infrastructure, and when they find out that the power is very unreliable, their answer will be ‘no!— I am not going to be going there’.
Prof Farley said that there can be several solutions to improve the electricity situation in Guyana. He added that the country needs to ensure that there are the right people doing the jobs and that appointments are based on merits.
“The manager that is responsible should be given some objectives”, he stated. The objectives, he said, need to be reviewed regularly.
When workers do a good job, he noted that they need to be congratulated. “People are not only interested in the financial side— that is important— they are also interested in the working environment and job satisfaction.”
Maintenance is another area whereby GPL can improve so that power supply can be improved altogether. “We cannot expect the machines to be churning day and night, without them going faulty, so we have to keep a good log of what is happening and when.”
Poor radio Signals
The poor radio signals being experienced by much of the population, especially those far away from the transmission radio sites, he said, can be blamed on the electricity situation. “We’re coming back to the same electrical problem. When the electricity goes off, people buy back-up generators, and a lot of these generators are not regulated, so they emit a lot of electrical noise. Because I do not know where the transmitter is for the radio in the Corentyne area, and because the signals are weak, the noise [being emitted from the generators] is greater than the signals, so what we hear is noise”.
Dr Farley said that this deserves some action.
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