B.E.L. to Invest $280M over the Next Five Years

Sean Fuller

B.E.L. also announced today that it plans on investing almost three hundred million dollars in the national electricity grid over the next five years to connect to new renewable sources of energy in-country, as well as introduce smart grid technologies to improve its services.

Sean Fuller, GM, Commercial & Retail Services, B.E.L.

“Dawn mentioned we are making projections for $282 million in investments over the next five years.  Those investments, we believe, are critical to B.E.L. being able to continue to operate efficiently, provide the level of capacity needed to be able to serve our customers and to build the level of redundancy needed.  For instance we investing in a new submarine cable to Caye Caulker.  We are investing in a second submarine cable to the island of San Pedro Ambergris Caye to facilitate the growth in demand on the islands  and also for redundant link for the two most popular destinations for tourists in this country.  We are also, in the next five years, going to be installing a second transmission line from La Democracia to Dangriga for redundancy and capacity growth in the south of Belize.  We are also very aggressively going to build the necessary infrastructure to connect to the additional in-country solar sourrces of electricity.  That is about forty-five megawatts of solar and additional twenty-five megawatts of LPG generation within the country.  That gives us a lot of in-country stability as far as reliance on the Mexican supply for electricity, especially when the Mexican prices are high.  We will now with these additional generation source be able to better serve our customers as far as the demand needed to serve them during those periods of time.  So we are also doing quite a bit of investments in our grid to modernize the grid to prepare for distributed generation solar, also for the eventuality of electric vehicle transportation in the country.”