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‘By purchasing gen sets, government could have killed two birds with one stone’ — Mahipaul
(Kaieteur News) – The government could have “killed two birds with one stone” by purchasing generator sets to meet growing electricity demand while awaiting the Wales Gas-to-Energy Project, instead of leasing two power ships at a cost of millions of dollars daily, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) Member of Parliament Ganesh Mahipaul said on Friday.
Mahipaul was responding to questions from this publication on the recently renewed contract with Turkish powership company Karpowership, signed at an increased cost, and what his party would have done differently.
A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) Member of Parliament (MP) Ganesh Mahipaul.
He said the first step would have been to respect the project’s original feasibility study and work within the framework it laid out, rather than proceeding into what he described as an exploratory phase without knowing the full implications.
“We would not have dropped the feasibility study and gone into an exploration phase, so to speak, by commencing construction without knowing the implications. We clearly see that this gas-to-energy project is a guess. As they move forward and encounter hiccups, huge sums of money have to be deployed to solve problems that could have very well been known through the feasibility study. We could have had a time boundary that was honoured, as opposed to what we see playing out with this gas-to-energy project,” he said.
Mahipaul pointed to a proposal the former coalition government had considered in 2019: purchasing generators that would be owned outright by Guyana, adding much-needed capacity to the grid while the country awaited the Wales project coming onstream.
Under that plan, he explained, Guyana would have owned the equipment and could have redeployed it once the gas-to-energy project became operational — sending the generators to Indigenous and other communities currently off the national grid.
“You have several communities as far as Masakenari in Region Nine, also known as Gunns. They could have gotten a generator to provide electricity for their community, which would have already been purchased and owned by the government of Guyana. Just the other infrastructure work would have had to be done to bring them quality and stable electricity,” he said.
He noted that several communities in Region Seven similarly lack the level of electricity access enjoyed along the coastline, and said prudent investment in generator sets could have addressed both the immediate coastal demand and these off-grid communities’ needs.
Mahipaul argued that the money being spent on the leased power ships represents a lost opportunity.
“Millions of dollars, going into close to billions, if this contract continues the way it is, are now going to be given to these power ships. And then when they’ve completed their task, they go their way, and our country loses resources that could have been invested in people’s lives, to make their lives more comfortable and better. That did not happen,” he said.
APNU reiterated that the government had originally promised electricity bills would be cut in half by mid-2025, a target later pushed back to the end of that year, and then again to mid-2026. The party contends the timeline may continue slipping — potentially as late as 2030 — allowing the power ship operators to continue profiting from public funds that could otherwise have been used to improve citizens’ lives.
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