Controversial Amaila Hydro project…Brassington admits Guyana will quickly outgrow Amaila

Aug 02, 2013 News

Technical Coordinator for the Amaila Falls Hydro Electric Falls Project, Winston Brassington, has indicated that within a year of the project coming on stream, the demand will have utilised the total supply, and in fact, Guyana will have to be looking at installing additional generation through another project, possibly with the Brazilians.
This revelation came on Wednesday last during the consultation with Sithe Global, the Blackstone Group and a Brassington-led government team.
“According to projections, by the time Amaila comes online in 2017, the expected supply of Amaila will be roughly equivalent to the demand,” Brassington said.
The team was asked to justify spending such a large sum of money (said to be US$858M) on a project, knowing full well that by the time it comes on stream there will be the need for additional generation.
Brassington said that there is currently no other project in the works and the development of the Amaila Falls Hydro Electric Project was already 13 years in the making.
“You say Amaila is too small now…What do you do? Do you walk away from it and look at the next project? Do we have another project that you can say has any certainty, and if so when? 10 years… 20 years?”
According to Brassington, when the project was first being developed it was at 100MW, and at that time it was projected to be too large for the Guyana Power and Light Inc.(GPL), relative to demand.
While conceding that all of the power from the Amaila Project will be fully utilised within the first year of its operation, he lamented that should Guyana walk away from the project, it would take another 15 years to get a similar project on stream.
“Any hydro project today, based on what it takes to develop it, you can start off with the most ambitious time-table and will not see any hydro in most likely 10 to 15 years.”
As regards maintaining the course for the project, Brassington told stakeholders “what we can say is that we will realize significant savings from going with Amaila.”
He said that once there is full utilisation of the energy, it will still be costing less than if compared to energy using fossil fuels.
“So those savings will stay with us… whether the project becomes small relative to our demand, we are still realizing those benefits.”
According to Brassington, when Amaila comes on stream and all of its power would have been used up, “we can then augment the increased demand with other projects, and indeed we are working with Brazil.”
“At the end of the day this project makes sense and we will realize savings from it; we will outgrow the project, but we wouldn’t outgrow the savings…Even if you say we will need more power, there are options later on this same hydro, but I can’t comment on them.”
This statement contradicts one made by GPL in March this year that “there is no expansion plan contemplated for the Amaila Project, nor has it been technically planned for expansion or phasing purposes”.

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Controversial Amaila Hydro project…Brassington admits Guyana will quickly outgrow Amaila

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