The Guyana Power and Light Company (GPL) will in three weeks complete running a cable across the Demerara River to boost the power supply to the West Demerara.
This is according to GPL CEO Bharat Dindyal, who spoke to members of the media at the Kingston Power Station yesterday.
“For the people on the West Demerara, they are going to see a dramatic improvement in the quality and reliability of their supply. Because we are going to have the ability to deliver power to West Demerara to the full requirement,” he said.
The US$5M project is a part of the funding for the upgrade of transmission and distribution systems under a US$42 million Chinese loan.
Dindyal said that workers are presently starting to lay the cable on the West Demerara, where a barge is located and on which the cable is sitting.
The cable has the capacity to deliver over 150 megawatts to West Demerara.
As a result of the investment, Leonora will have another big transformer that will deliver power to the rest of the West Coast.
Dindyal said that one of the biggest challenges to laying the cable is that the company is dealing with an active channel. “There are vessels traversing this channel all the time and we need to work around them. We are working with the Maritime Administration Department.
They have sent out an advisory and people who are transiting the channel will have to understand that this equipment is operating and they have to be cautious. While we are working out there we have to be cognizant of vessels coming into the work area,” he said. “At this point, many decades ago, the Guyana Electricity Corporation had a 12 Kv cable connecting those power stations to the West Demerara.
That cable was damaged by a ship’s anchor. This cable that we are laying is going to be sunk at least three and a half metres below the bed of the Demerara River. In fact, in the channel we are trying to sink it even deeper to about seven metres to ensure that it is well protected from rogue ships,” he added.
Dindyal pointed out that while the area was not designated as an anchoring area for vessels, there are incidents where ships might have broken from their mooring and drag their anchors. “So this cable will be well out of its way,” he said.
He added that apart from the power conductors that the cable carries, it will also feature a fibre-optic cable embedded within it. The fibre-optic cable will be used for communication and data acquisition, he said, noting that the company has allowed the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GT&T) to make use of the opportunity to lay a fibre-optic cable.
“We have allowed GT&T at a minimum cost to use the excavation across the river bed to lay a fibre-optic cable for their purposes,” he said.
According to Dindyal, GPL is also building a new control centre at Sophia to manage the cable and its power transmission function. He said that information on all the new systems will be flowing via a fibre-optic cable that is a part of the cable link to the West Demerara and there will be computer terminals with mosaics of the system that could be viewed. “So you could see what is happening with the system at a central point,” he said.
Dindyal said that the power company has in total 250 MVA in transformer capacity and with the Chinese infrastructure development project, it is adding another 117 MVA in six new substations.
“We are hoping that progress is going to be sustained this year and that as planned by mid next year, all these works would be completed and all the systems will be integrated and interconnected,” he said.
