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$130M to overhaul Kingston plant
Kaieteur News – The government is currently expending “around $130M” to overhaul a power plant at Kingston, Georgetown as the Guyana Power Light Inc. (GPL) struggles to keep-up with the current electricity demand in the country.
Minister within the Ministry of Public Works, Deodat Indar made this revelation during a press conference he held last Thursday explaining the reasons behind the country’s black-out woes. He said that GPL is currently operating below the peak electricity demand in the country because the Kingston Plant is down for maintenance. “GPL has right now a number of generating sets with a total in terms of reliable operating sets of 167 megawatts,” Indar said while noting that last few weeks the country has seen a peak demand of a 172 Megawatts. “…because that shortfall we see some blackouts,” Indar added.
The minister said that the Kinston Plant is critical to GPL’s base load since it adds a total of 7.8 Megawatts but it is in need of a complete overhaul. “This is an engine that is about 14-years-old , if we don’t bring it down for this general maintenance it runs the risk of the engine breaking-up right now to find engines of that size its hard”, Indar explained.
Minister within the Ministry of Public Infrastructure, Deodat Indar
The overhaul is scheduled to be completed by November 10 and will take GPL’s capacity back up to 174.8 Megawatts. However, the minister noted that this does not mean that it will end the blackout crisis in Guyana. He explained that although the GPL will be able to keep up with the peak demand it will be operating without any “spinning reserves”.
A spinning reserve must be one time and a half the capacity of GPL’s biggest generator and serves as a back-up to prevent a shut down if one of the operating plants goes down. GPL’S largest generator has a capacity of 9.3 megawatts and is located at the Garden of Eden power plant which has five such generators operating there. The country will have to brace for more blackouts until around mid-December because GPL has ordered some generating sets at a cost of some US$27.5M from a company called APAN INC. The generators are expected to arrive by mid-December and will add another 28.9 megawatts to grid and ramp up GPL’s total capacity to around 203.7 Megawatts. This will be a relief to customers but in 2024 the demand is expected to peak around 236 megawatts.
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