B.E.L. says that blackout coming but Mexico supplier says no power outages
Will there be blackouts? That’s the question that weposed today to both the C.F.E. and B.E.L. Under the Power Purchase Agreement which B.E.L. signed last August with its supplier of electricity, Comision Federal de Electricidad or C.F.E. of Mexico, BEL has three options in purchasing power. The utility company can purchase up to fifty megawatts of firm energy or fifty megawatts of energy at an economic rate if available and less expensive; and it can also purchase emergency power. But while that may be the case, B.E.L. says that C.F.E. has informed that beginning May eighth its power supply to Belize is likely to have interruptions over the next four months because of much-needed repairs. But in a telephone conversation today, C.F.E.’s Manager in Merida, Victor Corona, told News Five “C.F.E. will continue to supply energy to Belize with no interruptions”. That is good news if true, and B.E.L.’s Chief Executive Officer, Lynn Young, told us that they have a back-up plan in the event of a worst case scenario.
Voice of Lynn Young, C.E.O., B.E.L.
“They gave us notice that they have an emergency and say they cannot supply us with firm power so what happened after they told us that, we asked them, well what about economic energy and emergency energy, would you be able to supply us with that and their response was yes to the extent that they have economic energy, they will supply us with economic energy and of course the price will vary hour by hour. So what we are making plans for right now, we have enough in country generation to just make the demand in Belize but we would have to bring on the gas turbines, thing like that and we’d have to run the hydro more than we would have wanted to during the dry season. So what we plan to do is use as much economic energy as we can from C.F.E. depending on their affordability and they make up the difference with our gas turbine and maybe open up the hydro more and thing like that. We feel that we have enough things in place that we wont have rotating outages but rare we could have problems is if C.F.E. tell us they have to cancel the economic power for some reason like I said economic power–the arrangement with that is that its just as available, so what it means really, we are at heighten risk of not being able to supply if they were to cancel and at the same time we have an issue maybe on our gas turbine or anything like that.
The economic energy, like I said is power that they can interrupt at any time, that’s the definition of it and two; of course the price can be very expensive at difference times of the day. So it may very be, even though they can supply it, it might not be in our interest to buy it. At certain times in the day but what I think the people of Belize need to know is that we have taken the necessary steps to make sure we supply any power that C.F.E. cannot supply or cannot supply during their emergency.”
Marion Ali
“For a sustained period?”
Voice of Lynn Young
“We’ve been told by C.F.E. that repairs can last as long as four months and bare in mind that we are approaching the rainy season so also. I think that we are particularly exposed mostly for this remaining month of May until the rainy season kicks in when we will have far more hydro production than we have right now. So it’s something we have to monitor carefully and we are right now thinking as to whether or not we should rent machines or not. If C.F.E. is guaranteeing us that they won’t interrupt the economic energy then it wouldn’t make sense for us to rent machines but if we that feel that they would have to give interruption and in the course of three to four months, they’ve never run that long and not have interruption in economic energy from C.F.E. I’d be surprise if they continue supply without any interruption for economic power given the circumstances that they are experiencing.”
If Young’s announcement of renting machines and equipment raises your brow, well he says that will not translate into higher energy costs to consumers. And just in case you were wondering what the recent outages were about, we asked Young to explain.
Voice of Lynn Young
“Now that C.F.E. is saying that the firm power is not available then what happens we have to replace that with more expensive energy but we’re talking three to four months and like I said, once the rain kick in and we get more hydro production we should be able to offset some of this extra cost. So, we have run some numbers and see what the effect of the cost is going to be but we’ll be doing our best to make sure that we don’t need to ask for an increase of rates at this point in time.”
Marion Ali
“The recent interruptions in electricity supply over the past couple of weeks or maybe months, can you explain what all those were about?”
Voice of Lynn Young
“Well, there were two issues with that. One is that we had some work that we needed to do on the transmission line and every year we do maintenance of the transmission line because of our finical circumstances last year and actually, I don’t know if you recall but in its decision, the P.U.C. also limited how much money we can spend and different things and we didn’t have the money anyway. So a lot of maintenance we had to postpone last year and during this dry season as the cost of power went down and the and our situation improved, we decided to take the opportunity to do as much of the maintenance we can in this dry season so that we don’t end up with serious problems in the system down the road. So, that was part of it that we did. In this dry season we did maybe like twice as much work as we’d normally and then secondly we had a situation where one redeem at maintenance work, we were accommodating B.T.L with placing some cables on our poles and I think you know that the cable companies, the telephone company, they all run cable on our post. B.T.L. is running these cables on our high tension poles and to run the cable we have to take out the transmission line to run that cable. So in doing that we started running the details again. We have to make remake agreement with B.T.L., we decided to open the Magazine Plant temporarily until that job was finished but the machine at—we have machine at Magazine Road actually and it’s a very old machine and it’s proven not to be very reliable at all. So we had a couple outages when that machine tripped on us, right. But that project is finish now so we won’t be having it anymore and we have just a little more work to do on the transmission line to finish all the work that we wanted to get completed this year.”
