No point in building new power plant without fixing fault grind’- Opposition

Oct 20, 2022 News

Kaieteur News – As Government prepares to expend around US$2 billion to reduce the cost of electricity to Guyanese, the Opposition believes that there is no point in doing so if the energy will not be able to consistently serve the nation owing to frequent disruptions in transmission.

Economic and Youth Policy Advisor to the Leader of the Opposition, Elson Low during a Press Conference on Tuesday explained that to adequately address the ‘blackouts nightmare’ that plague the national grid, these issues must be addressed. In fact he believes this must be treated with equal importance as power generation. He told Reporters, “There is no point in building new power plants, natural-gas fueled or otherwise, if we cannot consistently deliver that electricity to consumers. While there is need to bring down energy costs, if that energy cannot consistently meet the consumer, it will serve little or no purpose.”

Economic and Youth Policy Advisor to the Leader of the Opposition, Elson Low

As such, he noted, “Upgrading and maintaining the national grid must be treated with the same priority as building additional power stations.” The Economist said it is ironic that while the PPP Government flaunts billion dollar electricity generation plans, it is yet to address this fundamental issue. Low reminded that in November 2021, Vice President (VP) Bharrat Jagdeo was quoted as saying, “We have a problem now with the grid and we are doing the study, so that by next year, we can have an overall improvement of the grid, so that… we don’t have all these blackouts.” However, the Opposition member argued that almost a year has passed since the VP made this statement all while “blackouts have become even more of a nightmare”.

According to him, during the work week, every time there is a widespread blackout in the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System, at least two hundred thousand workers are affected. Not only that but if this lasts for an hour, it costs the Guyanese economy at least $80,000,000. Low said even where businesses have generators, this too costs the economy, as businesses must spend money on expensive back-up systems which also produce electricity inefficiently.

To this end, he argued, “Rather than admit failure, admit that they are struggling to maintain, much less advance the current grid, the PPP continues to try to blame the Coalition for GPL’s woes. They have been in office for 2 years, or 40 percent of a standard Presidential term, and are still blaming the Coalition.” Moreover, the Economist pointed out that this year’s Budget is almost 50 percent larger than the previous year, yet no strides have been made to address the transmission lines and the national grid. Insisting that political parties must not pass blame but deliver results, Low went on to list the efforts made by the Coalition to address the issue.

“It is obvious to anyone paying even the slightest attention to the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System that it is extremely vulnerable. In order to make the system more robust, the Coaliton Government had established a second cable between the Vreed-en-hoop and Kingston stations. We had plans to replicate this approach between the Vreed-en-Hoop and Garden of Eden stations and Sophia and Kingston stations,” he said.

Additionally, to boost reliability, the Coalition Government replaced 87,717 service lines and put in place plans to upgrade the lines serving the Garden of Eden station, the Economist reported. “Similarly, almost all the transmission lines, over 300km, were repaired or upgraded. In fact, 502 new transformers were installed, and 2,292 defective transformers replaced,” Low added. He believes that these measures substantially increased reliability of power supply to customers and that deliberate, competent efforts must be made to increase the system’s reliability. At the same time, the Opposition member noted that there is little hope for this under the PPP as the administration have put back the same ‘incompetent’ management it had pre-2015.

Only on Sunday the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) Inc. announced that it is seeking contractors to supply a total of 50 megawatts (MW) of Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) generated power to the national grid. Recently, there have been constant shut-downs of the Demerara Berbice Interconnected Systems (DBIS) resulting in long periods of power outages across the most populated Regions in the country. In the absence of Press Conferences and regular briefings by President Irfaan Ali and the rest of Cabinet, the public remains in the dark on what have been triggering the frequent blackouts in the system.

It must be noted that this move to seek HFO-generated electricity for a five to 11-year period comes against the Government’s promise to deliver 300 Megawatts of power via its much touted Wales Gas-to-Energy (GTE) project by 2024. A number of experts and activists have questioned the feasibility of this project in the past and its ability to deliver on the promise of reducing electricity bills by 50 percent, given that the project cost has increased from an estimated US$478 to around US$2 billion.

The Gas-to-Energy project, as previously reported will encompass three major aspects, that is, the pipeline to transport the gas to Wales, the Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) facility that will treat and separate the gas, and the power plant to generate the electricity. So far, Guyanese have been told that the pipeline aspect, which is being pursued by US oil major ExxonMobil, will cost around US$1.3 billion. Even this is expected to increase when Exxon closes critical contracts for same. In the meantime, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo was hoping to have the other two components come on stream for US$700 million. Notably, there has been no word on plans to upgrade the national grid as well the distribution network to adequately deliver this power to citizens.