No Mexican power until April 4th

Belize Electricity Limited today received the bad news that Mexico will not be able to supply prime time electricity until April 4th. The disabled 484 megawatt Merida Three plant was supposed to be up and running by Friday, and the delay will mean that Belize’s energy situation will be touch and go for the next several weeks. BEL’s Mike Polonio explains.

Michael Polonio, Dir., Customer Services and Business Dev.

“In such a situation we might have some temporary outage problems, but we do have some strategies in place. For instance we can call on our partners in the private sector that own their own backup diesel generation to come on stream and to ease the peak demand a bit. Also, we are sort of…we have a contingency plan in place to bring in backup diesel generators from abroad as soon as we see the definitive need for it.”

Stewart Krohn

“What would you ask right now… Is there anyway the public could help to ease the strain on the system?”

Michael Polonio

“Absolutely. We think that this is a period where we would want the public to conserve that power just a little bit, maybe turn the knob of the AC units down. A notch to two would certainly help, particularly during the peak period. It would be a good idea to turn certain lights out in rooms that are unoccupied, which would help a lot in the customer’s own bottomline and also help us to reduce the peak.”

Stewart Krohn

“What’s the long term strategy?”

Michael Polonio

“We need to get our generation plan in place. We need to have the generation there well before it’s needed. I am referring to our least cost generation recognition, which is Chalillo. We need to get Chalillo on stream just about as soon as possible.”