B.E.L. says that blackout coming but Mexico supplier says no power outages
Will there be blackouts? That’s the question that we posed today to both the C.F.E. and B.E.L. Under the Power Purchase Agreement which B.E.L. signed last August with its supplier of electricity, Comisión Federal de Electricidad or C.F.E. of Mexico, BEL has three options in purchasing power. The utility company can purchase up to 50 megawatts of firm energy or 50 megawatts of energy at an economic rate if available and less expensive; and it can also purchase emergency power. But while that may be the case, B.E.L. says that C.F.E. has informed that beginning May 8th its power supply to Belize is likely to have interruptions over the next 4 months because of much-needed repairs. But in a telephone conversation today, C.F.E.’s Manager in Merida, Victor Corona, told News Five “C.F.E. will continue to supply energy to Belize with no interruptions”. That is good news if true, and B.E.L.’s Chief Executive Officer, Lynn Young, told us that they have a back-up plan in the event of a worst case scenario.
Voice of Lynn Young, C.E.O., B.E.L.
“They gave us notice that they had an emergency and said they cannot supply us with firm power, so what happened after they told us that, we asked them, well what about economic energy and emergency energy, would you be able to supply us with that, and their response was yes, to the extent that they have economic energy, they will supply us with economic energy and of course the price will vary hour by hour. So what we are making plans for right now, we have enough in-country generation to just make the demand in Belize, but we would have to bring on the gas turbines, things like that, and we’d have to run the hydro more than we would have wanted to during the dry season. So what we plan to do is use as much economic energy as we can from C.F.E. depending on their affordability, and they make up the difference with our gas turbine and maybe open up the hydro more and things like that. We feel that we have enough things in place so that we won’t have rotating outages, but rare, we could have problems is if C.F.E. tell us they have to cancel the economic power for some reason, like I said, economic power--the arrangement with that is that it’s just as available, so what it means really, we are at heightened risk of not being able to supply if they were to cancel, and at the same time we have an issue maybe on our gas turbine or anything like that.
The economic energy, like I said, is power that they can interrupt at any time, that’s the definition of it and two, of course the price can be very expensive at difference times of the day. So it may very be, even though they can supply it, it might not be in our interest to buy it at certain times in the day, but what I think the people of Belize need to know is that we have taken the necessary steps to make sure we supply any power that C.F.E. cannot supply or cannot supply during their emergency.”
Marion Ali
“For a sustained period?”
Voice of Lynn Young
“We’ve been told by C.F.E. that repairs can last as long as 4 months and bear in mind that we are approaching the rainy season, so also I think that we are particularly exposed, mostly for this remaining month of May until the rainy season kicks in when we will have far more hydro production than we have right now. So it’s something we have to monitor carefully, and we are right now thinking as to whether or not we should rent machines or not. If C.F.E. is guaranteeing us that they won’t interrupt the economic energy, then it wouldn’t make sense for us to rent machines but if we that feel that they would have to give interruption and in the course of 3 to 4 months, they’ve never run that long and not have interruption in economic energy from C.F.E. I’d be surprised if they continue to supply without any interruption for economic power given the circumstances that they are experiencing.”
If Young’s announcement of renting machines and equipment raises your brow, well, he says that will not translate into higher energy costs to consumers. And just in case you were wondering what the recent outages were about, we asked Young to explain.
Voice of Lynn Young
“Now that C.F.E. is saying that the firm power is not available, then what happens is that we have to replace that with more expensive energy, but we’re talking 3 to 4 months and like I said, once the rains kick in and we get more hydro production we should be able to offset some of this extra cost. So, we have run some numbers to see what the effect of the cost is going to be, but we’ll be doing our best to make sure that we don’t need to ask for an increase of rates at this point in time.”
Marion Ali
“The recent interruptions in electricity supply over the past couple of weeks or maybe months, can you explain what all those were about?”
Voice of Lynn Young
“Well, there were two issues with that. One is that we had some work that we needed to do on the transmission line and every year we do maintenance of the transmission line because of our finical [exacting especially about details] circumstances last year and actually, I don’t know if you recall, but in its decision, the P.U.C. also limited how much money we can spend and different things and we didn’t have the money anyway. So a lot of maintenance we had to postpone last year and during this dry season, as the cost of power went down and our situation improved, we decided to take the opportunity to do as much of the maintenance we can in this dry season so that we don’t end up with serious problems in the system down the road. So, that was part of it that we did. In this dry season we did maybe like twice as much work as we’d normally, and then secondly we had a situation where one redeem at maintenance work, we were accommodating B.T.L with placing some cables on our poles and I think you know that the cable companies, the telephone company, they all run cable on our post. B.T.L. is running these cables on our high tension poles and to run the cable we have to take out the transmission line to run that cable. So in doing that we started running the details again. We have to make remake agreement with B.T.L., we decided to open the Magazine Plant temporarily until that job was finished, but the machine at—we have a machine at Magazine Road actually, and it’s a very old machine and it’s proven not to be very reliable at all. So we had a couple outages when that machine tripped on us, right. But that project is finished now, so we won’t be having it anymore and we have just a little more work to do on the transmission line to finish all the work that we wanted to get completed this year.”
…And B.E.L. C.E.O. gives reasons for recent power outages
So what if there are power outages and your appliances are damaged? Young explains.
Voice of Lynn Young
“What causes damage to equipment most times is when the wiring in the homes is not properly grounded, then you find that equipment gets damaged. That’s one of things that cause it and also of course, issues like lightning hits and the lines and stuff like that, but just the act of turning on the power or turning it off will not necessarily damage the equipment unless our guys makes some kind of mistake in their switching. When we find that there was some kind of issue on our switching that we couldn’t avoid, because sometimes there are those instances and we honor those claims.
Equipment that is old and near its time, you find that it will blow, especially bulbs, for example. You notice sometimes bulbs blow when you put them on because that’s when it draws a big current. So, yes when things are turned off and on, you find a base on in-surge, but that is part of the nature of the electrical system.
A lot of the damages that people bring forward is actually as a result of the communication system not being properly grounded also, so when you have cable system, a cable connected to your television and the cable network is not properly grounded then when the switches get turn on and off, you find that you get a serious voltage imbalance between the cable connection and electrical connection and that has caused lot of damage to television equipment and we’ve been sensitizing the cable companies to that situation. I know the telephone company does very good grounding on its system, but we found that a lot of the cable operators were not properly grounded their cable system and that is, we believe, the reason why a lot of televisions get damaged when the power goes on and comes off, goes off and come on back.”
Marion Ali
“And for that you don’t take the responsibility?”
Voice of Lynn Young
“No, we don’t. We advise customers and the cable companies to try to get their systems better grounded.”
If you feel your equipment has been damaged by power outages you can call the nearest B.E.L.’s office in your area to make your complaint. And late news to the newsroom is that the planned A.G.M. of B.E.L. has now been postponed to June 15th due to the flu threat.
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