The Guyana Power and Light Company will rent six Caterpillar generating sets to make up for generating shortfalls as it moves to purchase another power plant, Cabinet Secretary, Dr. Roger Luncheon announced Wednesday.
Work is currently ongoing to acquire a 20 Megawatt power plant for the Kingston Power Plant. It is planned that it should be operational by August, Luncheon said.
In the meantime, the six Caterpillar sets will be rented, on a six-month contract basis, and these will be installed as soon as they are available. “The anticipation is that this would be done in a matter of weeks,” he said. “The overall expectation is that those interventions will shortly see an improvement in GPL’s generating capacity and therefore significant reduction in outages,” he said.
Power outages have been plaguing the city in recent times. Luncheon said that planned maintenance as well as mechanical factors contributed to the outages but this had little to do with the new Kingston Power Plant; he blamed the current situation on problems occurring at the Garden of Eden station and existing power plants. He noted that one generation plant was removed from Garden of Eden for unplanned maintenance.
