– gas-powered electricity on track for December delivery

Over the past few years, the Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) has been investing heavily in upgrading existing infrastructure as well as installing new infrastructure in preparation for the operationalisation of the highly anticipated Gas-to-Energy (GtE) Project, which is slated to deliver some 300 megawatts (MW) of electricity to the national grid. In light of the infrastructural upgrades, Public Utilities and Aviation Minister Deodat Indar related that state-owned power company will be ready for the off-take of power, which is expected by the end of this year. “GPL will be prepared for that because we’ve been working for years now. It’s not today we started,” Indar explained during a recent appearance on the Starting Point podcast. He pointed out that more than US$720 million has already been invested to build out new infrastructure to facilitate the distribution of power from the GtE Project, located at Wales on the West Bank of Demerara (WBD), onto the national grid. These include the installation of new high-capacity transmission lines as well as the construction of a number of new substations and upgrading of existing ones. The new infrastructure will see the power moving from the Wales site across the Demerara River to the Garden-of-Eden Substation, then to the newly built Goedverwagting Substation and then to the Sophia Substation. Power will also be sent from Wales to the Vreed-en-Hoop Substation, as well as from the Goedverwagting Substation all the way to Berbice via the newly installed transmission lines. In order to facilitate the installation of the new transmission lines, a new road network is being developed in the backlands along the East Coast corridor from the Goedverwagting Substation heading to Mahaicony in Region Five (Mahaica-Berbice).

Infrastructure upgrades