Lynn Young Explains What’s Behind Rising Light Bills

A lot of Belizeans have been asking the same question lately: why is my light bill so high? BEL says there is no single reason. The company points to rising fuel prices, heavier electricity use during extreme heat, climate-related problems affecting power generation in Mexico, and Belize’s limited local generation capacity. Together, BEL says those factors have made electricity more expensive to purchase and produce. This morning, Executive Chairman Lynn Young explained how those costs are being calculated and what the utility is doing as consumers continue to demand answers.

 

Lynn Young, Executive Chairman, Belize Electricity Limited

“The biggest one, of course, is oil prices. So what happens is that oil prices kinda trickle through everything, but of course, we ourselves, we generate electricity. BEL has two gas turbines that it uses, and it generates with diesel. And since the beginning of the year, diesel prices and BEL gets duty-free diesel, but still the prices has almost doubled. And so just the diesel alone burning in the generators, the cost is more than what we sell the electricity for, just for the diesel alone. So that’s been hurting the cost of power significantly.  In addition to that, over the last, I’d say about sixteen years or so, we haven’t really added any good base load generation in the country. So now we are at a situation where we are short of twenty megawatts when CFE cannot supply us. Or if CFE’s prices shoots up on us, we have to take it because either that or we have blackouts. But in cases like a couple of days ago, and we are still kinda tentative, when they say they cannot supply us, then we don’t have enough generation. And to put it in perspective, generation projects, they  are big investments, and it take a few years to come to fruition. So, for example, the government started pursuing the solar projects quite a while ago, but these projects, they’re multi-million dollar projects. It takes a year or two to get financing in place. Then the engineering might take another year or so. And procurement, these are not things, the equipment to connect to the grid, et cetera, transformers et cetera, you don’t buy them off the shelves. You have to engineer them, spec them, and then they get manufactured. And what is happening right now too, the lead times are long because of the wars, both in Ukraine and in the Middle East. And then the logistics is a challenge too because it takes longer to get things delivered.”

 

Young says power costs have jumped sharply. At times, Belize has paid Mexico’s CFE as much as one U.S. dollar per kilowatt-hour, while BEL sells power to customers for no more than about forty-four cents Belize. That gap, he says, is putting real pressure on the company.

 

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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