When will Belize’s Energy Crunch be Alleviated?  

Compounding the energy crunch are technical difficulties being experienced by BELCOGEN which uses biomass to provide electricity.  Also, in the days ahead, BAPCOL, another energy supplier to the national grid, will be doing systematic repairs to its machines.  As we’ve said, this means more load shedding.

 

Dawn Sampson-Nunez, General Manager, B.E.L.

“The challenge here is weather-related damages to the transmission system and as a result we then need to source more energy from the hydroelectric facilities.  That then is causing a reduction in the water levels at the hydro facilities and so that’s a situation that we need to manage going forward. The other challenge that we’re dealing with here is BELCOGEN. BELCOGEN has notified us that they’re experiencing some technical difficulties with their infrastructure.  They have indicated to us that they should be offline for about two weeks. So that’s one challenge that we’re managing there.  BAPCOL, as well, they have notified us that they need to carry out some very urgent maintenance repairs on their machines.  We currently get about, I think it’s about twenty-two or so megawatts from BAPCOL.  There are about three machines that supply us with power from BAPCOL.  They will be taking out one unit at a time and each time they take out a unit it’s about two days they’ve indicated to us they will need to be offline.  So again, we’re managing the situation at BAPCOL.  The situation with BELCOGEN, they expect to be out for about two week.  It is possible that they can come back before, as well, it might take a little longer.  We’re managing the weather-related outages, the impact that it’s having on our transmission system.  So, in a nutshell, where we are at this point in time is that there may be the need for load shedding from time to time.”