Accidents, human activities cause 99% of GPL shutdowns

For this year so far, 99 percent of the electricity shutdowns in the country were because of accidents and because of carelessness by those carrying out activities near the power network.

To curb this, the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) company has begun imposing penalties against person/s who are responsible for these acts.

“We have these issues of vehicle accidents, where people are driving into the network causing damage to our poles, bringing down feeders,” GPL Deputy Chief Executive Officer Bharat Harjohn (ag) said recently.

“So of recent we start to implement penalties…We are taking a no nonsense approach,” he stated at a press conference.

When these incidents happen, Harjohn said the company is forced to mobilise teams, regardless of the time, to ensure power is restored.

“Whilst we are working behind the scenes to maintain a reliable supply and ensuring that our system works efficiently and minimize shutdown, we are now faced with this additional challenge,” he noted.

Harjohn referenced one case where an individual was cutting bamboo, causing the tree to fall on the transmission line, bringing down the entire system.

In this instance, he said a $40M penalty was imposed.

Another challenge GPL has been faced with recently is the construction sector, with some workers coming into contact with power lines.

When this happens, Harjohn said explained “the protection system will activate because it’s doing its job and when it’s activated, it takes that line completely off and it depends on the load that line was transferring at the time, it could have a domino effect in the system.”

These problems compound the problems for the power company which is struggling to keep up with the demand.

In recent months, the country has been faced with constant load shedding and GPL has been forced to put a power-outage schedule in place.

This has been happening because GPL does not currently have the capacity to feed the increase in demand for power across the country.

At a recent press conference, Minister within the Ministry of Public Works Deodat Indar said GPL purchased a number of generators and transformers to a tune of US$27M from Apan Energy.

When commissioned, he said this will add 28.9 megawatts to their capacity.

Once the equipment is set up and in operation, Indar said load shedding is expected to be drastically reduced by mid-December.