New B.E.L. gas turbine ready to rumble

After weeks of round the clock hard work, Belize Electricity Limited says those hours in the dark waiting for the lights to come back on may soon be nothing more than a bad memory. B.E.L. says their gas turbine generator at mile eight on the Western Highway should be ready to pump out kilowatts by next week. According to B.E.L.’s Derek Davis, testing on the new facility started on Wednesday.

Derek Davis, V.P., Planning and Engineering, B.E.L.

“At this point, the project is near completion whereby the major parts of the installation has just about been completed and we are now starting commissioning of the unit. Today will be the first day when the fuel is sent to the unit and what we call first fire, the injectors, fuel will be passed through the injectors and the turbine fired up for the first time. So it is an important step in the whole process. All the pumping systems etcetera will be tested, testing will start on and provided that goes well within the next four to five days, the unit should be up and running on a commercial basis.”

“At the end of the day we would have had the twenty megawatts of emergency power available such that if we lose any one of our major suppliers, from hydro or Mexico, we will have this back up power immediately available to restore the system. As we had said with this unit in place we can get the system back up in ten minutes as opposed to one or one and a half hours without it.”

With the completion of the Chalillo project, the majority of Belize’s electricity will come from hydro-power, followed by purchases from Mexico, with the gas turbine set to take up the slack. The demand for electricity is increasing by around eight percent annually. This means that new sources of cheap power, such as that derived from bagasse at B.S.I., are expected to come on stream in the near future.