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Exxon’s second bill board misleading – Jagdeo
The billboard in the vicinity of the Russian Embassy.
Kaieteur News – ExxonMobil’s second billboard in the vicinity of the Russian Embassy reads “Powering Guyana…The Gas To Energy Project is expected to bring reliable, affordable electricity.”
Vice President (VP) Bharrat Jagdeo, last Thursday at his weekly press conference, explained that the project will not be powering Guyana as a whole, since government will have to seek alternative sources of energy for the county of Essequibo, as they do not have a cable to go across the river. Hence the billboard is not correct.
The VP was asked by a Kaieteur News reporter about the message on the billboard and he responded: “I don’t know the exact writing on it, so I don’t want to comment. It’s not going to power the whole country because (of) the interconnected grid. So now we gotta build a transmission main from Garden of Eden all the way to… in fact maybe from Eccles will have to be upgraded from the control center all the way to Linden too.”
Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo
“Because we are making some investments in Linden, now we are putting in that the government is going to finance 12 or so megawatts of solar panel, but we are paying BOSAI now a substantial sum of money every year to supply power to the community at very exorbitant rates. Because we have to buy the power from them, we now need to take that power also to Linden. So we’d have power from Linden all the way to Crabwood Creek and then across the river so we’re working on an alternate arrangement for Essequibo because we don’t have a cable to take the power across,” he added.
Jagdeo went on to say, “So maybe that’s what they mean by expected (to power) the country, I don’t know the exact thing but it will come online next year. It will bring 300 megawatts of power. GPL now supplies about 160-170 megawatts of power at peak demand in the interconnected grid so that will tell you that it’s nearly double of what we have now that GPL supplies will be available to supply the country.”
While Exxon’s billboard is saying the project is expected to provide affordable electricity, the VP is saying that the project will meet all the demand and this it is, “guarantee that the price will come down by 50% that guarantee so we know it will come on-stream next year. We know the price will come down by 50%. We know they will have nearly twice as much power now than GPL currently supplies.” Furthermore, all of the equipment that GPL now has supplying the country with electricity will “go into reserve so in case anything happens, we can bring those online. I don’t know who wrote it but I am sure about these things.”
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