B.E.L. Activates Load Shedding Following CFE Mexico Challenges  

On Monday, the Belize Electricity Limited informed its customers that CFE Mexico is encountering difficulties in maintaining power supply to our grid. As a result, CFE has asked the company to make the necessary arrangement to supply Belize’s demand from our local generation sources. According to B.E.L.’s statement on Monday, the nation’s demand for electricity is currently over one hundred megawatts, while the maximum available in-country capacity is around eighty-four megawatts. So, what does that mean? Well, B.E.L. will have to carry out significant load shedding to maintain the stability of the grid. In simpler terms, the company must temporarily cut off electricity to certain areas to prevent the entire system from failing. Belize Electricity Limited held a press conference this afternoon where Jose Moreno, the General Manager of Distribution Services, told reporters that the company is working to increase its supply capacity to the country.

 

Jose Moreno, General Manager, Distribution Services BEL

“Last night was one of those days where they called us and told us we need to curtail your supply and you guys need to zero the transfer of power at the interconnection point. When that happened we had to bring up all the generation possible and that was not enough so that we could zero and that was not enough. We had to do some load shedding. We opened some of our distribution feeders to meet that requirement. What is happening to us is something we saw happening and we took action. We went ahead and purchased another gas turbine and we have deployed that to San Pedro however that is still not commissioned. It is expected to be commissioned by the end of May early June. We have another project that is really impacting our decisions, is the availability of the gas turbine at Mile Eight. That unit is undergoing another upgrading project. We are almost at the end of the third week in that project. We have GE and other contractors working on turbine replacement. That is why we went ahead and notified our customers that during these thirty days we will be very vulnerable because without the additional mega watts of capacity, we take that twenty megawatts from our in country equation, we lose the capacity to have those emergency or block start procedures in case we lose the system. That happened this morning.”