Jagdeo's promised 50% reduction in electricity tariff for 2025 in doubt

Jagdeo’s promised 50% reduction in electricity tariff for 2025 in doubt

Jun 21, 2025 News

Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo.

Kaieteur News – Vice President, Bharrat Jagdeo on Thursday failed to provide a definitive response on whether Guyanese will be able to enjoy the promised 50 per cent reduction in electricity costs by the end of this year.

Ever since the Gas-to-Energy Project was announced, the government has been dangling promises of cheaper electricity by 2025. The administration said cheap electricity would be available once the project was completed by its initial completion date of 2025.

However, there have been numerous delays and with a new completion date of June, 2026 being floated, citizens are questioning whether they will still see the 50 per cent cut on their electricity bills for this year.

Jagdeo was asked at his Thursday’s press conference, “on the Gas-to-Energy Project and the 50 per cent reduction you had said that there was a possibility that government might not wait until the completion of the project when it was expected to be done by the end of this year, that we could see there is a possibility we could see the 50 per cent, could we still see that?”

Jagdeo told reporters he does not think this should be an election issue, as if it is done immediately the opposition would come out to say that they have decided to grant the reduction in light of the elections.

“…this project is going to be completed next year, (so) before then or at the completion point the price of electricity in Guyana will be cut by 50 per cent, and that’s a promise we made…so let me leave it at that… it could happen before but it’s also the outside date is the completion of the gas-to-energy project which is slated for June next year,” the VP said.

On September 27th, 2024 it was reported by this publication that the highly touted US$2 billion gas-to-energy (GTE) project is intended to reduce monthly electricity bills by 50 per cent but vice president, Bharrat Jagdeo is unable to say how soon consumers can expect this reduction.

In the absence of a feasibility study for the project, stakeholders have been constantly questioning the project’s capacity to deliver cheaper electricity.

The VP during his weekly media conference was asked how soon after the operationalization of the plant, a 50 per cent reduction in the cost of electricity could be expected.

To this end, he explained, “I don’t know if one day or a week or so but it will, it should happen almost immediately because if we are getting all this power in the grid immediately that means we can turn off a lot of the high-cost generating equipment that we have now and substitute this with the new power plant so almost immediately. The benefits will be seen almost immediately.”

The GTE project is expected to deliver some 300 megawatts (MW) of cleaner and cheaper electricity.

Jagdeo noted that the Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) generating sets, currently in operation, will be turned off and be used as a backup power supply.

“If the gas-to-energy project can meet the demand, and that is we are generating at 4 cents per kilowatt hour there, then every other generating set will go into reserve,” he said.

The vice president noted that the country is presently operating without any reserve, due to a large increasing demand for electricity.

According to him, “Our installed capacity is close to peak demand so there is no reserve so that’s why if a unit goes down you have power outages, so these reserves now would be there so just in case you have local issues or something, they would be maintained and put into reserves.”

Be that as it may, Jagdeo said if the demand surpasses the 300 MW generated by the Wales power plant, government “may have to turn on some of these units back again.”

Government expects the GTE project to be completed by April, 2025. The contractor, CH4/ Lindsayca has however indicated that the power plant and Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) facility will be handed over at a later date. The extension is likely to cost the contractor some US$11.3 million per month according to Jagdeo.

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50% reduction, Bharrat Jagdeo, Electricity, Gas-to-Energy (GTE), Heavy Fuel Oil

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