B.E.L. cites problems, predicts better future
With its annual general meeting coming on Tuesday, what would have been a pretty upbeat report to shareholders may more closely resemble a wake. With blackouts now a daily occurrence due to a multiplicity of short-term problems, B.E.L. this morning faced an impatient press corps. And while there was no attempt to sugar coat the situation, company C.E.O. Lynn Young assured the public that Belize’s system of electrical generation and distribution is sound and getting stronger.
Lynn Young, C.E.O., Belize Electricity Limited
“We are returning to normalcy even as we speak.”
Janelle Chanona, Reporting
Normalcy? Oh yeah, that’s when blackouts were a rarity instead of part of the regular routine. B.E.L.’s C.E.O., Lynn Young, this morning cited dust storms, brush fires, salty seasonal winds and perhaps most disturbingly, a shortage in our own backup power generation, as reasons why much of Belize has been left in the dark for hours on end.
Lynn Young
“The dust would get on the insulators and then when there is a high wind, there would a salt spray and salt would get mixed with the dust and cause first, a little crackling and then we get shorts that would damage the insulators, would cause transformers to blow and obviously causing outages. In some cases, the shortages would cause the pole tops to get hot and burn the heads of the poles.”
“So we got the fire service to wash in this area and last night again they washed in another area. Today we’ll be doing some more washing although we had a very good rain last night that helped. After the washing, our guys drove around and we did not observe the crackling and the sparking that was taking place before, so we are optimistic that that’s going to work.”
“Our biggest effort has always been to try to protect those transmission lines and they have been extremely reliable over the years, but this year we have had fires in areas that are normally swamps. And those areas, we did not put any fire protection at the foot of those poles, so we have to go back and look at this whole situation and in some of those areas where we did not have fire protection, we have go in and put fire protection at the foot of the poles.”
The Belize City-Ladyville feeder supplies the biggest and most sensitive load in the country: from Belize City up to Sandhill, across Boom and back to the city through the Western Highway has been the hardest hit with some outages lasting as long as fourteen hours.
Lynn Young
“Because it’s a long feeder it tends to take longer for us to find problems on this feeder so if there is a small crack on this feeder, the guys have from here to Crooked Tree, all the way through Boom cut-off down back to your area to try to find that problem. What we are doing now with this feeder is we’re putting a bypass through Boom; and that’s almost completed. When we put that bypass then we will take off most of the rural areas off these feeders and these feeders will start gain more of the characteristics of the city feeders.”
To help the system get back on track, B.E.L. is working around the clock on its gas turbines at mile eight and in the medium term is planning to use bagasse and the Chalillo hydroelectric facility as major new power sources. But the company admits it will still be a struggle to meet peak demands.
Lynn Young
“Two or three years ago, the twenty-five megawatts from Mexico, along with the diesels that we have, were sufficient to meet the peak demand even when there was lower water flow. As the load continued to grow and it’s growing by ten or twelve percent per annum, we’ve reached a point where if we cannot any generation out of Mollejon, or if we can only get only two or three hours as is happening right now, then there would be times of the day when we would be short of capacity.”
“We thought that we could have got the gas turbine project done maybe early this year. In fact, the environmental approval process took two months longer than we had expected, so it’s actually delayed and we expect to finish it by the end of July. In addition to the environmental approval process on that one, we have to apply to the Public Utilities Commission. We applied and then we had an objection from BACONGO, which delayed that process also. So the entire process was delayed significantly between the environmental approval and the objection from people opposed to new generation projects.”
During the dry season Mexico supplies more than fifty percent of Belize’s electricity…the rest B.E.L. produces through diesel generators and Mollejon. And as the Comission Federal de Electricidad works through its own problems, Belize is the first to get bumped off the Mexican grid.
Lynn Young
“One of the challenges we have when we lose supply from Mexico is that our diesel engines are not big enough to take on a big chunk of load at any one given time. We have to bring on the load in little pieces and that takes two sometimes three hours for us to get the entire system back together.”
According to B.E.L., Belize will continue to rely on the Mexican power, but the gas turbines at mile eight should produce at least twenty megawatts of backup power and come online within fifteen minutes. In addition, high voltage washers to keep the lines free of dust and salt would mean less outages. But the company says long-term solutions will mean an upgrade in distribution lines and power from several different sources.
Lynn Young
“I understand the scepticism of the public. It sounds like hey, it’s just a lot of excuses, but I think we take comfort that a lot of the outrage is because over the last two or three years, service has been good. And I think what people want to know is that we are going to get there again, and we will. We’re working hard at it, we know what we need to do and I think with time we’re going to get it done.”
According to the weather bureau, last night’s rains fell almost precisely where they were most needed; that is along the route of the high voltage transmission lines running from Corozal down to Belize City.
