Data Center Boom Is a Risk and an Opportunity for Belize

Could Belize’s energy crisis eventually become an opportunity? BEL says the next two years will remain difficult and expensive, but it is looking beyond simply keeping the lights on. Executive Chairman Ambassador Lynn Young says Belize must invest in local generation as electricity from Mexico becomes less dependable. The long-term goal is ambitious: produce enough power at home to one day sell electricity back to Mexico. But getting there will require major investment. Here’s how Young explained it.

 

Lynn Young, Executive Chairman, BEL

“They have advised us that it’s going to be at least two years or so, because they have some issues with gas and the generation that they are adding. We can take them at their word, but the reality is that these data centers in North America are creating significant demand in North America, in Canada, and in the United States, and I have no doubt that whatever extra generation is built in Mexico, there’s going to be tremendous  pressure to push that power up north or to build more data centers in Mexico. The reality is that small countries like Belize, and we who are importing energy from Mexico, I don’t think we will be able to rely on that as foreign energy. Now, I might be wrong, but my sense of what’s happening in the market is that we need to have fair power in Belize. That’s a risk, but it’s an opportunity, too, right? Because if they’re going to be having it, if they’re going to be short of capacity for so long, one of the things we want to discuss with them is the opportunity for us to sell power into Mexico, which then gives us the opportunity to put in bigger plants and gives us a little bit more security, because then we can sell the excess into Mexico. So we have to look at the international market and see, yeah, there are trade stores, but there are also opportunities that we can work on. And these are the things that we are working on, that we are trying to stabilize things here in Belize, and maybe turn these challenges into opportunities while we try to keep the costs down. To keep the costs down over the next couple of years, we have to finance our way through this.”

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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