GPL maintenance wrapped up, extra crews stand by to tackle faults – CEO tells Berbice

After months of recurring blackouts across Berbice and other parts of the Demerara–Berbice Interconnected System (DBIS), Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL), Kesh Nandlall, has assured the public that the company is now better positioned to deliver a more reliable supply of electricity during the upcoming Christmas season. Residents across the region have endured a series of outages in recent months, some linked to major technical faults at Kingston earlier in the year and more recently, to maintenance works, feeder burns, and even the disruption of key transmission lines. As recently as last week, Berbicians expressed frustration after a day-long shutdown caused by unexpected restoration challenges during scheduled upgrades. These incidents have amplified calls for GPL to stabilise the grid and communicate more clearly with affected communities. Against this backdrop, Nandlall said the company has now completed most of the maintenance work in Region Six (East Berbice-Corentyne) and the wider grid, which contributed significantly to the recent interruptions.

“You should not experience much outages as a result of maintenance,” he assured. He explained that the commissioning of a new 60 MVA transformer at the K2 substation had caused some temporary instability but stressed that the system is now performing more reliably. Looking ahead to the holidays, Nandlall reported that GPL expects a peak demand of about 215-megawatts (MW), while the company currently has more than 250-MW reliably available. “From a generation perspective, we are in a very, very comfortable position,” he said, adding that GPL will work very hard to ensure that it provides more reliable power for the holidays.

Extra emergency crews
However, the CEO acknowledged that emergency faults can still occur, such as a structure fire on Thursday night that forced GPL to shut down two feeders for about two hours, but said the company is preparing aggressively to respond. Speaking with this publication, he said that extra emergency crews will be deployed across the grid throughout the holiday period. These teams will be pulled from internal staff who would normally handle maintenance. “We will assign additional resources… because we will not be doing maintenance work. We will pull those resources together and ensure that we have more available personnel for emergency response,” he explained. Nandlall said that with maintenance now out of the way and additional crews are on standby.