Belize Electricity Limited made an announcement today that will have
an effect on us over the next 4 months or so.

BEL buys electricity from a hydro-power company in Mexico. The
Mexican company announced that due to problems with their own power
plants, they will suspend the sale of power to Belize for 4 months,
starting now.
BEL advises customers to be conservative in their use of electricity.

An unexpected interruption in the supply of electricity from Mexico
caused a brief country-wide blackout last week. Both Belize and
Mexico rely heavily on water in dams to make electricity. Water
levels in reservoirs naturally drop at this time of year, making for
difficulties in generating power under "normal" circumstances. This
is also a time when brush fires tend to disrupt things in Yucatan, QR,
and Belize. If Belize has no power at all coming in from Mexico
for the next 4 months we may want to anticipate and prepare for
frequent an prolonged lapses in power.

Once again a good case for a back-up generator and well-placed surge
protectors.

The hardware store guy is smiling.

Well now we are royally screwed...Happy days, dark nights...blown elec appliances...increase in crime....noisey generators.....hot fan/ac/less homes.

.

Wow, what's next?

Can't remember the last time we saw the stars in their full glory.


Been a few years since we experienced rolling black outs - come on guys - it will be like the good old days!

We'll have to play trivial pursuit instead of dungeons and dragons.

And tell the kids ghost stories instead of watching Sponge Bob.

Can't work in the office without the a/c - shoot, might have to go fishing instead -

hey, I am warming up to this idea....

Re stars: I guess we lucked out last Thanksgiving night while down there - I have never seen so many stars in the sky while on Island Ferry coming back from my birthday dinner at Rojo. Everybody on the boat was looking skyward and saying the same thing - it looked like the sky was painted with sparkling diamonds. Just beautiful!

This would be a perfect time for GOB to take advantage of wind power generated from the Caribbean breeze, and solar power from the sun.

Banana Beach has back up generator large enough to power the whole resort. Please come be our guests!

Imagine the money we will save!

How will all the people wanting green golf carts recharge their batteries??

Now and then

laurie, i think amanda meant can't see them anymore in town because of light pollution. you had less of that on island ferry cuz you were on the sea, same if one is way north or way south of town.

that's a great attitude to take, amanda & tim... hope the news doesn't adversely affect too many.

One more nail in the coffin of the already struggling shop keeper. The brown outs and frequent outages cause tons of problems with all types of electric appliances, particularly commercial fridges and freezers. The time and expense between losing a compressor and finding a new one and having it installed on the island is unreal. Hard to maintain any perishable inventory with the potential of these types of problems. Unfortunately back up generators are expensive to run and the time between power off and generator on is deadly to most electronics. Hopefully the powers that be will come up with some sort of interim fix.

Man my upcoming visit could be just like the ole days over on CC, I remember the first time I came down and they threw the switch on the big generators on the back of the island at like 10:00 or so in the evening. For about three minutes as the fans began to slow down and stop spinning it was absolute serenity, until the bar cranked up the gas generator next door to keep going......

I have been hooked ever since......

CFE UNABLE TO PROVIDE BEL WITH FIRM ENERGY

April 30, 2009


Belize Electricity Limited says it is working to secure sufficient energy supply to meet the country’s peak demand of over 74 megawatts after the company received a notice from Comision Federal de Electricidad of Mexico that it will not be able to supply BEL with firm energy for the next four months beginning May 8. BEL says during the dry season it purchases as much as 43 megawatts of firm capacity from CFE. BEL says in its notice CFE explained that damage to major generating equipment in central Campeche following the total system outage yesterday has severely limited its capacity to provide firm energy to the Yucatan Peninsula which has forced that company to suspend the firm energy supplied to BEL. This damage was responsible for a national power outage in Belize. BEL says it currently sources power from hydroelectricity, the West Lake Generating facility, diesel generating plants in Belmopan and Caye Caulker and from mobile units. BEL goes on to say that since hydroelectyric production is less than it is in the rainy season, BEL will continue to use local generation sources efficiently to minimize possible power outages. BEL ends its release by encouraging customers to continue practicing energy conservation.

This indicates a cessation of Mexican grid power on May 8 rather than today.

One definition of firm energy: >>Firm energy refers to the actual energy guaranteed to be available. Nonfirm energy refers to all available energy above and beyond firm energy. Firm energy is often available at substantial discounts over nonfirm energy sold on the spot market. Energy producers such as hydroelectric plants and wind farms may may have nonfirm energy available due to unexpected weather or seasonal conditions.<<

It's still unclear to me whether CFE is saying that they WILL definitely, absolutely cease providing all power to Belize on May 8 or whether it is saying they MAY cease providing it.

Doesn't BEL have a contract with CFE that provides penalties if CFE doesn't deliver under its contract?

--Lan Sluder

One of the reasons we feel so comfortable in the area we chose to live in is because Banana Beach, with its gigantic generator, is so close. After the hurricanes two years ago, with the power outages, it was wonderful to be able to get hot coffee, breakfast and internet access the following morning at Banana Beach. Whenever we have power outages now, we just go outside, enjoy the breeze and wait to hear the Banana Beach generator switch off, which always lets us know when the power has come back on. If you don't have your own generator, or you don't want to run it unless absolutely necessary, it is wonderful to live near a resort with these facilities.

Sounds like it was a magical night. From my house there is a lot of light interference which means I can't see ALL of the stars, but I do see plenty to keep me happy.

But when you out in a boat the stars are AMAZING. I don't go out in boats an night very often.

sj, i knew what she meant, just reminded me of that one night, how absolutely gorgeous it was. Never seen anything like it before.

Surge Protectors for all my friends ha ha.

Sorry, surge protectors do not help with low voltage and brown outs. Generators are great but the damage can be done before they kick in. During Arthur last year, there was a time that there was just enough current to run light bulbs but nothing that had a compressor. Fried a lot of expensive equipment. Low voltage is a killer. According to one of the BEL guys on the island that is in the know, Belize has enough diesel and gas turbine power to suffice. Perhaps this is just a big old media event to kill the call by the public for the rate reductions that were promised. Naw, couldn't happen.

Ya gotta learn to roll with the punches...thats the San Pedro way.

Lan, Some years ago Quebec Power (we had contracts with their hydro & nuclear plants to deliver power at x dollars to our New England grid. The price of oil went up and we thought we where all set, we had long term contracts. The problem was trying to enforce international contracts and at what cost. We where threatened to have our contracted supplies shut down. There is a lesson here. You can only really control what is within your boundaries and you should plan accordingly. I don't really recall how it was resolved but it was a wake up call at the time and caused some anguished moments of uncertain supply.

Ambergrishog Handyman Eddie told us that a line monitor (I think it was) are what we need in addition to surge protectors to really help safeguard against low voltage issue.

Do you (or anyone else) know anything about line monitors?

If theres no power,nothing will help..except maybe a generator...

we are coming the first week in july should we rethink this?

tg, I don't know what you as a end user can do on short money. That is a question I know little about. At the power plants we have trips on our generators at a certain cycles high & low. (equates to voltage) Either condition can cause problems and especially with electronic equipment like computers. Getting the proper voltage to a population area can be a complex problem. It has to do with wire size carrying power in; line voltage; megavars; distance from power source and more. I ran a plant in Boston for years and our primary purpose was to keep the voltage from sagging. (very important near financial centers with all their computers) That plant made little money on power generated and most of the time we ran at minimum load. (our purpose was voltage control) A few years ago when the infrastructure was upgraded they shut that plant down.

This is one of the problems we are going to have with solar and wind power. The infrastructure just isn't there right now and it takes years and tons of money to get it there.

A few years ago I used to see the plant in SP running a lot in the daytime. I’ve been told that your power comes mostly from Mexico so at the time I assumed that it was running for voltage protection. I have never talked to anyone there so I really don’t know. Does the SP plant generate enough of power for the Island???

Will wait to see the validity of this press release. In the meantime, I am happy to report that Xanadu has just completed the installation of a state of the art back up generator system. This system has the capability to run the entire resort including a/c's, and full kitchen facilities in all our suites. It may be time for me to consider living on property!

This page gives a good description of different types of power protection.

http://www.alliedelectronics.com/Power-Data-Protection.html

To protect computer/networking equipment we use power conditioning UPS batteries from Oneac. IMHO, they are best.

http://www.chloridepower.com/en/USA/Products/Technologies/UPSs2/

For anything that doesn't require uninterrupted power, a UPS battery isn't necessary. For appliances and general purpose protection against surges/sags, a Transient Voltage Surge Suppressors (TVSS) should suffice. These get hooked up between the BEL meter and your breaker box.

We recently had a customer install a few of these and so far so good:

http://www.ditekcorp.com/product-details.asp?ProdKey=5

For the ultimate protection, the best thing you can have is an isolation transformer (aka power conditioner) which gets placed inline on 220v or 110v feeds to your equipment. The isolation transformer does what is says, it takes the AC from the outlet, "transforms" it to DC and back to AC - cleaning the power along the way 24x7.

sorry, laurie. yeah, we had a night like that 2 years ago - we drove WAY down south with Axeman. it was amazing - a blanket of stars - we could not even speak...

Power outages are not a big deal. They come and go, sometimes more frequently, sometimes less so. If you are really worried about it, just make sure you book a resort with a generator. They can be a nuisance for those of us who live here but for a visitor, they are just part of the adventure and charm. Many very good resorts on the mainland and in Mexico on the Yucatan don't even have power at night and that makes them even more appealing. I remember coming here as a tourist and how lovely it was to come back to our cabana in the rainforest, lit by kerosene lanterns. Most of the local restaurants depend on gas for cooking, so you won't go hungry. Not much you can't do with a big of gas, candlelight and the Caribbean Sea. In fact, I can think of a lot of very fun things you can do.

I knew we picked the right place . With the personal help we have received and now the generators we couldn't ask for more! Thanks again Stace! ful thanks

I remeber the old days before the Mexican cable was installed. The diesel plant was the only source of power back then. It did a decent job. We did indeed have frequent black outs and brown outs. We were happy to have power at all. I ran battery back up for my computer, but refrigerators did take a major hit. We just unplugged them. Ice was a valuble comodity. If you were nice to Malcolm, you could buy some at Fido's. Back then the water for ice was rain water off the roof. Amazingly we never got sick from it. Racoons lived in the thatch. Oh....those were the days!

Seeing what the raccoons left on your roof would make you sick!

I have a couple of good UPS systems that I'm not using right now. To bad their 60lbs each or I'd bring them down with me this trip.

They are readily available here.

OK I don't mean to be paranoid but maybe I am. We are coming down in November and staying at a house up north. So how long do the power outages usually last, how often under normal circumstances do they usually occur? We have a person with us that has to have a breathing machine hooked to him during sleeping hours. Is this going to create problems for him? Not a choice he has? So even though this says 4 months, could that be longer? Just trying to get p's and q's in line to make some decisions.

Current can go out in Belize at any time for many reasons, even without the Mexico situation. For his needs you should make sure the resort or house has a backup generator.

DeeDeeuz .....

November is well after the 4-month difficulty.
It will have been raining and Belize's hydro plant as well as Mexico's should be functioning well beyond need.

We have the occasional hour long "planned maintenance" outages - which are in the daytime and are announced ahead of time. They are every couple of months, and rarely during rainy season.
As for the unplanned ones - could be a 5 minute flutter or could be a few hours if lightening strikes a transformer or something like that.

Power outages could occur anyplace, so north south or in town is not the issue. See if the place you are staying has a back-up generator. Many homes have them and if so, you are well covered. Also check into a battery for backup on the breathing machine maybe?

Dabunk and Diane, Thank you for your prompt and considerate response to my questions. I do feel much better about coming now.

Mexico Cutting Back on Power to BEL

There were intermittent power outages scattered throughout the weekend –
but if you felt that was inconvenient, you’d better buy some batteries,
because it could get worse; BEL warns that starting on Friday, May 8,
Mexican power provider CFE is cutting it off for four months. It’s nothing
personal, apparently the Mexican power company has experienced damage to
major generating equipment in Campeche.

During the dry season, BEL gets more than half of its peak power from CFE.
So, the only good news is that the rainy season is around the bend. But
until then the company will have to juggle available sources of power to
compensate for the shortfall. It urges consumers to conserve power.

CH7
http://www.7newsbelize.com/sstory.php?nid=13909&frmsrch=1

Central Station in Campeche, Comision Federal de Electricidad.

As of tomorrow May 8th, Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) in Mexico will cut Belize’s supply of electricity for the next four months. In an unexpected press release issued on Thursday, April 30th, following a major power outage the day before, Belize Electricity Limited (BEL) stated that CFE experienced substantial damages to their main generating equipment in the central state of Campeche. The damage occurred last week Wednesday and caused a major outage in all southern states of Mexico and in Belize. 

        The Campeche station supplies the southern states of Mexico on their National Grid and Belize is a part of that grid. CFE says that the damages severely limits their capability to provide firm energy to the Yucatan Peninsula. This has forced CFE to suspend the firm energy supplied to BEL. Belize’s peak demand of electricity averages 74 megawatts (MW) and more than half, 43 MW comes from CFE during the dry season.

        In speaking with The San Pedro Sun, BEL Public Relations Officer Vonetta Burrell stated that Belizeans can expect the typical operation of the company to continue. So can major power outages be expected? Burrell stated that, “BEL will do their best to utilize its available power sources and will try to maintain the reliability of electricity to the company.”

        According to BEL, their current sources of power are from hydroelectricity, the West Lake Generating Facility, diesel generating plants in Belmopan and Caye Caulker and from mobile units across the country. Since hydroelectricity production is less during the dry season, BEL says that they will continue to use local generation sources efficiently to minimize possible power outages. Just this month, on April 6th BEL connected to Belize Aquaculture Limited (BAL) for the provision of 15 MW of firm power supply to meet the system demand and to maintain system reliability. Hence, BEL is encouraging all customers to continue practicing energy conservation.

        This is the first time in BEL’s history that they will be cut off from CFE for such a length of time.

San Pedro Sun

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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