The Guyana Power and Light (GPL) Inc. now has sufficient power to maintain 67 megawatts in reserve, according to Vice President Dr Bharrat Jagdeo.
The reserve affords the power company a backup supply which is ready to generate electricity within minutes of a shortage on the power grid.
This follows the connection of the 60MW powership to the grid earlier this week, leading to 267 megawatts of power becoming available.
The Vice President told reporters on Friday that the current demand for electricity is at 200 megawatts, leaving 67 megawatts of power in reserve to facilitate maintenance of GPL’s generator sets and to help the company meet better performance levels.
“This will allow them to take out some of the other sets which had delayed maintenance and do that maintenance now without affecting the availability of power in the system,” he noted.
As such, Jagdeo said “we don’t expect to have blackouts the way we had because of the shortage of power…there may be blackouts associated with faults in the transmission system, but it must not be from lack of power.”
To eliminate power outages or total shutdown of the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System (DBIS), GPL needs to duplicate its transmission lines.
According to the Vice President, the power company has tendered for a 230KVA line to transmit electricity from Georgetown to Crabwood Creek, East Berbice, Corentyne.
“With us generating 5-600 megawatts here, we need to move that and the 69KVa line can’t move that amount of power all the way to Berbice. We are doing the same to take power to linden,” he said.
Another $200M project is underway to upgrade transformers and other components of the grid to increase capacity as part of the government’s Gas to Energy project.
