Residents have complained about the alarming number of power outages over the past 24 hours, which they are concerned could damage equipment and appliances.
The Guyana Power and Light (GPL) recently issued a three-week load shedding notice which was to allow for maintenance work at the new Kingston plant, but residents say the frequency of the power outages is alarming.
Rolling blackouts have affected residents for about a week now, some lasting for hours.
However, over the past 24 hours the electricity has been on and off for in some cases eight to ten times.
The power outages are expected to last another two weeks.
GPL Public Relations Officer Ron Robinson told Stabroek News yesterday that the company’s press release issued last week served as an important advisory to consumers.
GPL said last week that it is conducting a major overhaul of its No 2 Unit at the new 207MW Kingston plant, noting that its peak demand in the recent past has been 74MW and its projected availability for the duration of the exercise is 75.4MW. Although it expects to generate adequate capacity, the fleet includes a large number of high speed Caterpillar gensets and some old generating units and as such there is the inherent risk that generation capacity may be inadequate due to forced (breakdown) outages.
GPL said that it would be publishing a load-shedding guide in the Guyana Chronicle and on NCN (radio and television) and on CNS channel 6, as a result.
It said too that the level of load shedding programmed is based on a demand forecast and if the demand happens to be less than that forecasted, then the level of load shedding will be reduced accordingly.
