The meeting between Prime Minister Mark Phillips and Minister Deodat Indar with GPL’s Board of Directors and CEO Bharrat Dindyal
March 10 ,2021
-after meeting with PM, Public Works Minister
The Guyana Power and Light Inc (GPL) has again pledged to bring an end to the frequent power outages which have been sorely affecting residents on the East Coast and East Bank of Demerara.
This commitment was made during a meeting with the Prime Minister Mark Phillips and Minister within the Public Works Ministry Deodat Indar. Such pledges have routinely been made over the years by governments and GPL.
Over the weekend some communities were plagued with frequent power outages, a result of encumbrances to the 13.8kV line and lack of maintenance. This, Stabroek News understands, has been affecting the transmission of electricity from generating plants to households.
Indar yesterday told this newspaper that they met with the power company’s Board of Directors and engaged in talks focussing on the efficient delivery of service.
During the discussions, Indar, who has responsibly for energy in the Ministry, said the board of directors and management committed to a timeline to execute works to fix the transmission issues and eliminate power outages.
The minister explained that over the next few days the company will be aggressively working between the Sophia, Georgetown, to Ogle, East Coast Demerara communities to remedy issues affecting the transmission line.
“We have areas where there are encumbrances on the transmission line. Some areas there are trees affecting the lines, other parts the lines are sagging and areas where the poles are tilted. So all these issues have been contributing to the frequent power disruption,” Indar explained.
He pointed out that the company has already carried out some works in several villages on the East Coast to remedy the problem.
“These encumbrances affect the flow of electricity. When the breeze blows hard the wires touch, it feeds back to the system and that causes it to trip, resulting in a shutdown,” he added.
According to Indar, the company has committed to prioritise maintenance work and have the transmission and distribution issues rectified in three weeks.
“We don’t have issues of power generation now. We have enough power in a revolving capacity because when we took office we fixed that with additional generators, so we have enough power now we just have to fix the transmission issues,” he stated.
GPL Chief Executive Officer, Bharat Dindyal, who took part in the meeting, said that the company is facing issues regarding not conducting enough maintenance over a period of time, resulting in the system experiencing trips.
“When these things happen, we have to look at what is threatening the line and that would mean walking the line pole by pole to find the issue,” he noted before stating that the utility company is working to return to a point where they have performed enough maintenance on the transmission system to maintain performance.
Dindyal noted that the GPL power grid has expanded over the years and requires extensive maintenance to ensure that the system performs as it should.
“… because there is an ongoing deficit in the amount of work needed to be done on the maintenance of the network… immediately you want to look at things that are causing trips in the line, you have to walk the line pole by pole to see what is affecting the lines, trees touch the line, conductors and insulators out of place,” he explained before noting that only when those issues are rectified there can be a stable transmission network.
He added that while there are resources to execute the work, they are working to implement an effective plan in a short time frame.
With this issue rectified, Indar said customers on the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System will benefit from a significant reduction of power outages.
The Department of Public Information in a report stated that according to the PM, there has been a lack of maintenance activities on the national grid but stressed that customers should not have to suffer for prolonged periods.
“We have inherited a transmission and distribution system that, frankly speaking, should have gone through continuous maintenance over the last five years. My understanding is that the maintenance schedule over the last five years has not been consistent. So, we are at a stage now where we are doing a lot of corrective maintenance work,” he noted.
He went on to state that the main reason for the outages is GPL’s undertaking of extensive corrective work on the transmission and distribution system and urged affected citizens to “bear with GPL” as they execute these corrective works.
Meanwhile, chairman of the board, Maurice Gajadhar, said the power company should do better in their delivery of service to customers.
He noted that the company is working to improve its service and gave his assurance that the company will continue to do so.
“I have blackouts too… Are we doing our best? Probably not. Are we trying to do our best? Absolutely. Things have to change and if it does not change, we have to go… We care about your service and we care about your life and we will fix it… We at GPL are also consumers and we feel your pain… I have been bombarded by customers and we are trying to change the system to bring it to a point where it works for all our customers,” Gajadhar assured.
Further, Indar stated that apart from talks on a solution for transmission and distribution issues, the need for effective communication with customers, protection of workers (both permanent and contracted), and building human resources capacity, were among other areas that were discussed.