Nine months later, still no word on GPL $3.6B tender

Nov 20, 2016 News

-embattled Chinese firm starts repair on damaged submarine cable

Four months after a critical power cable that was badly laid across the Demerara River was damaged, work has finally started to repair it and bring it back into operations.

Work being conducted in the Demerara River yesterday on the GAICO barge to repair the damaged submarine power cable.

The more than $120M in repairs will take about three weeks to complete with the cable expected to be repowered way before Christmas, officials of the Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) said yesterday.
Contractor, Gaico Construction and General Services Inc., is providing the barge, Gaico Marine1, to help raise the cable and dig the channel to lay it.
However, GPL has turned back to CMC, the same Chinese contractor which had badly laid the cable in the first place, to conduct the repairs.
Critics and a report by consultant, Caribbean Engineering and Management Consultants (CEMCO), had blamed the poor laying as the major cause for the damage, likely made by a passing vessel.
The cable, which is supposed to be an armored one, had been critical to bringing power from the new 26-megawatts power station at Vreed-en-Hoop, West Bank Demerara to the inter-connected grid in East Demerara and Berbice.
The extra power from West Demerara was needed for a stable supply on the coastlands.
GPL was forced to wait for weeks before the cable kit and sections were shipped in.
Over the past months, there have been a significant number of outages and total shutdowns in all three counties due to a combination of factors.
While GPL has managed to reduce the outages, consumers have remained angered by the incidents with the Cabinet becoming involved.
However, the new power plant at Vreed-en-Hoop, run by Finnish-owned Wartsila, had to cut back on its generation as there was no way to send it across the Demerara River.
The previous administration has been coming under fire for not doing enough to supervise CMC.
CEMCO, the consultant, had been extremely critical of the Chinese company and especially the laying of that cable.
The fibre optic submarine cable had been part of a larger US$40M programme to run new high-power transmission lines along the coastlands stretching from West Bank Demerara to Corentyne, Berbice.
The work included the two submarine power cables—one across the Demerara River and the other across the Berbice River. The idea was to create an entire grid along the Berbice and Demerara.
CMC was also criticized for another component– the building of seven sub-stations along the coastlands.
The under-fire CMC has also tendered for a major project to run low and medium voltage transmission lines along the coastlands and install more than 25,000 smart meters across the country, in a pilot phase.
The tenders, which included local and international companies, were opened in February but since then, there has not been any award.
GPL’s Chairman, Robert Badal, had indicated that evaluation would have been completed by the end of last month. But there has been no word since.
There has not been any explanation why the evaluations took that inordinate length of time to evaluate.
A number of letter writers have raised concerns over the silence of GPL regarding the delays for that major project.
The monies for the project are coming via a loan of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and grant funding of the European Union under a program to upgrade GPL’s capacity.

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