Two months later: GPL’s Garden of Eden plant back up but problem not found

The five electricity generators at the massive Garden of Eden power plant on the East Bank of Demerara (EBD) are once again operational but an investigating team has still been unable to determine what exactly forced them to shut down.

The Guyana Power and Light (GPL) was forced to shut down the power plant amid fears of a massive explosion on January 14.

Since then, a team of engineers from Wärtsilä have been attempting to identify what caused the issue. Wärtsilä is the company that constructed the plant; this facility only came into commercial operation in November 2021.

But on Monday, exactly two months after the shutdown, GPL’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bharat Dindyal told the News Room that there has been no update on the root cause of the issue.

He highlighted, however, that all five of the generators at the plant are in service.

While the Wärtsilä team dismissed theories of what led to the malfunctioning of the generators over the past few weeks, GPL has been repowering the generators.

Each of the five generators can supply 9.3 megawatts (MW) of power. In total, the East Bank plant provides about 46.5 MW of power to the Demerara Berbice Interconnected System (DBIS).

In total, peak demand for electricity for GPL’s customers stands at around 120MW. Since the shutdown, that demand has been satisfied by older machines with intermittent power outages (load shedding).

And Dindyal previously told the News Room that the fourth and fifth generators were being examined as part of the investigations. With no update on what caused the malfunctioning, however, these remaining two generators were operationalised recently.

Dindyal also told the News Room that GPL has not received a recent update from the Wärtsilä team but said that he was sure that the investigation into the issue is continuing.

In a press release issued last month, GPL stated that the investigating team will remain on site and continue to monitor the operation of each unit and is expected to advise the Company on the findings of the root cause.