The Guyana Power and Light (GPL) might soon be paying its customers to generate their own power under an Integrated Utility Service Programme.
According to GPL’s Chief Executive Officer Albert Gordon, the programme will see the company working with customers to reduce their demand cycle and finance self-generation and “tie them into the generator.”
“It is one of the quick things that is in the best national interest. Looks like we are shooting ourselves in the foot since we are losing some business but we are working to make the overall economy better,” Gordon said.
At the time, he was responding to questions posed by Stabroek News following an appearance before the Public Utilities Commission.
Asked if his company had put any measures in place to compensate customers for loses suffered due to frequent and prolonged blackouts, Gordon responded that while damaged equipment is sometimes replaced based on complaints received, the company does not and cannot pay consequential damages.
“That would send the utility out of business. If utilities start to give consequential damages, the cost of an outage to, say, a factory, is a whole lot more than what you pay per kilowatt hour. When we are planning for economic cost of having adequate supply for consumers, we are using a US$1.50 per kilowatt hour. We say if we don’t supply power, this is the cost to our customers but we can’t pay it. We plan to prevent it but we can’t pay it,” he explained.
In lieu of the inability to compensate for losses caused, the company encourages customers to “be mindful” that interruptions are possible and possibly work on their own generation of power.
The company, which recorded a whopping 106 outages per customer in 2018, is investing in a series of measures to improve its generation capacity this year.
According to Ryan Ross, Divisional Director of Projects, GPL will reconfigure the feeders at its Kingston Plant, upgrade the substation at Kingston, construct a transmission line from Kingston to the Sophia substation, normalise the Vreed-en-Hoop substation, install alternative cable for the 69kV submarine cable, upgrade SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) to allow for automation, install auto-reclosers on 13.8 kV circuits and split the loads on the Good Hope F4 Feeder.
