B.E.L. says it can supply country’s power demands

You will know that there have been scheduled blackouts around the country. In July the Public Utilities Commission (P.U.C.) held a press conference regarding the loss of power supply from its main source, Comision Federal de Electricidad; its generator at West Lake Park on the Western Highway and from Hydro Maya. It all came in a flurry, and the P.U.C. had to admit that B.E.L. would likely be forced to resort to rotating power outages around the country. The black- out scare was real, but it didn’t quite live up to the hype. But are we yet out of those troubled waters? B.E.L.’s C.E.O., Lynn Young explains.

Lynn Young, C.E.O., Belize Electricity Limited
“We’ve completed repairs at West lake. That took us about little over a week—I think it was about ten days to get it back in service. It was an expected—during one of the routine maintenance, we found one of the shafts had a little burn on it and the manufacturer advised that we should get it replaced to avoid a catastrophic failure. So we decided we had to take it out and that was just about ten days. The problem is that C.F.E., during that time, had one of its main units out and then later on they had another one of their units its Merida that they had taken out. So C.F.E. had given us notice that they cannot guarantee the supply to Belize. We worked out an arrangement with them where they would supply power, kind of, what we call interruptible power that they could just give us short moments notice and take off the power. We have enough in country sources to keep the power on even without C.F.E., but ones the gas turbine had to be taken out, then we need that if C.F.E. had called us, we would have to have rotating outages as it turns out C.F.E. was able to keep on the power during those ten days and now we have the gas turbine back. So right now, we are still ‘ify’ with C.F.E. C.F.E. is still in a situation where they call every so often and say they can’t supply power because they are still trying to get their machines back up and running. They have said that they should be out of the situation sometime in September. But because we have hydro running at full tilt right now, the gas turbine is back on line. So, between those and the Belize Aquaculture—the power that we are buying from them—even when C.F.E. says its can’t supply us, we can supply whole country with those sources.”