B.E.L. Says Load Shedding Has Become Necessary  

According to Mencias, what has been taking place is load shedding, a controlled process of temporarily reducing electricity consumption across different areas to ensure the stability and continuous operation of the national electricity grid.  During the presser, the Chief Executive Officer also informed that CFE, Belize’s energy supplier in Mexico, was only able to provide twenty megawatts to the grid until three o’clock this afternoon.

 

John Mencias, C.E.O., Belize Electricity Ltd.

“So we have to load shed and that is what happened on Monday.  And that is actually what is happening right now as we speak, that CFE has agreed today to supply us about twenty megawatts up to 3:00 this evening.  It’s three o’clock already?  But as of three o’clock they are going to cut it down to zero which means that we have to take off even more feeders throughout the country.  So those are the reasons for the recent power interruptions.  There’s a shortage of generation capacity in the country.  Now, I want to make it abundantly clear to everyone that CFE is not acting outside of the contractual arrangements with BEL.  What we purchase from CFE is called opportunity cost energy.  It use to be called economic energy which means that it is interruptible at any moment’s notice.  However, CFE has worked with us, they have tried to give us two hours notice, sometimes it is less.  The relationship with CFE goes way back.  It goes way back to the 1980’s.  They have been a reliable provider of electricity for Belize.  They have enabled us to keep our costs down, but importantly, also, they have provided us with great support and to put that in context, our systems are interconnected.  We are very small compared to them.  Any jolt in our system, they are able to handle it for us and that is the importance of being connected to a big brother like CFE.  However, we have been aware for some time that they have also been having generation shortage problems of their own and also what we call transmission congestion problems.  And that is why we have been emphasizing that we need to build in-country generation capacity to a level to be able to meet our peak demand within our own country.  That does not mean that we’re saying we don’t want to continue our relationship with   CFE.  We want to continue that relationship with CFE.  They provide us, as I said, with grid support and when the price of energy from CFE is low, we want to purchase it.  it’s to our advantage.  However, our focus has been since 2019, on energy security.  Well from before.  But we have made a point, we are driving the point that we have to stop relying on CFE to meet peak demand in country.”