GPL failures

Jun 10, 2025 Editorial, News

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Kaieteur News – Just over two months ago, the performance of the Guyana Power and Light Inc. came under review before the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) where it was revealed that the company scored very poorly for its operating standards and performance targets for 2024.

At a public hearing on March 13, last, at Herdsmanston Lodge, Georgetown, the commission said it was dissatisfied with GPL’s non-compliance and apparent passive approach to the targets. The review was measured using eight standards: customer interruptions, voltage regulation, meter reading, issuing of bills, accounts payable, accounts receivable, system losses, and average availability.

As this newspaper had reported, in the area of customer interruptions or blackouts, the PUC said GPL exceeded its target of 85 customer interruptions for 2024. At the end of the year, customers experienced an average of 123 interruptions. GPL indicated at the hearing that there were several reasons for the non-achievement of this target, including feeder trips, reduction in generation capacity due to unavailability and planned maintenance of generator sets, public and private sector construction equipment interrupting transmission lines, and an increase in vehicular accidents affecting the transmission and distribution infrastructure.

It was no surprise to Guyanese that the power company had exceeded its target for blackouts.  More than one PPP/C Governments have made electricity the crooked cover under which there is pretense of doing something better for Guyanese plagued by blackouts for decades. It is a never-ending haemorrhaging of money by the millions and billions annually. Guyanese live with a chronic sickness, which has a most familiar name–blackouts. Blackouts are so regular, so common, so ever-present that they are now an inseparable part of almost every Guyanese family. This is so particularly for those citizens who cannot afford the huge cash outlay for a generator, or the greater expense of solar power. So, most Guyanese live with the fear, dread, and agony of blackouts.

It is beyond denial that blackouts, the constant and devastating repetitions, are bad for families and communities. But what is bad for the great majority of Guyanese, who have to live with them, is incredibly good for one PPP/C Government after another and its insiders. Those squeezing enormous benefits from blackouts and off the backs of struggling, suffering, sickened Guyanese are high political leaders and their handpicked cronies who have some relationship to the generation of electricity in this country. To repeat: the blackouts that are harrowing for poor Guyanese are prospering beyond belief for PPP/C Government leaders and their kith and kin.

In numerous national budgets many millions are set aside for the GPL so that a reliable source of electricity through refurbishing key areas of the company, recruiting knowledgeable people, obtaining better systems can be had. The costly projects have been countless and come like clockwork, year after year. This is so that electricity can be transmitted to Guyanese, for them to go about the tasks of regular life involving their homes, their children, their work, their leisure, their worship, their care when they are sick. There is a huge problem: Guyanese are not getting the electricity promised.

The problem is that after all the many millions that have been spent, the people who are supposed to benefit from a better supply of energy, and get something dependable from the millions supposedly put to work, they are either in the same place, or worse off than before. It is clear that something is terribly wrong with this national issue of electricity and blackouts; what has long been a full-blown national crisis first gets worse, then even worse. What is becoming clearer still is that the leaders who spend millions are deceiving and cheating citizens who look to them for electricity answers, energy solutions.

We at this publication make this clear: Guyanese are being taken for a ride. This is because a quality electricity supply is a leadership lie. The GPL functions as the machinery, one of many, but one of the bigger ones, through which the leaders of this country steal and rob the people blind. This is through old and new (proposed ones, too) multimillion dollar projects that always seem to fall short, new systems put in place that collapse, old technology replaced that don’t hold up. Guyanese need to get something in their heads: electricity and the GPL (to it, from it, and through it) function as the channel through which crafty leaders in the PPP/C Government carry out their robberies of the national treasury.

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• blackout, GPL failures, Guyana Power and Light (GPL), power outages, Public Utilities Commission

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