BEL Says they did not Request Rate Increase

The Belize Electricity Limited wishes to clarify that it did not request an increase in rates in its recent Annual Review Proceeding submission to the Public Utilities Commission. B.E.L. points to a press briefing on January sixth during which its General Manager of Legal and Corporate Service, Dawn Sampson-Nunez said “We proposed in our submission to the P.U.C. to recover the difference between what the actual cost of power was in the previous period and the approved or reference costs of power we propose to collect that at a later time and I think it’s 2023. And the reason for that is simple we are experiencing economic hardships, we thought that it’s better to defer.” The clarification follows a story on Friday in which we reported that the P.U.C. would not be approving an increase in the mean electricity rate, which currently stands at point three nine, nine, nine per kilowatt hour. In that story, it was also mentioned that B.E.L. had indicated they needed a rate hike due to a cost overrun from suppliers that was higher than projected.