GEORGETOWN –  The second power ship that the Government of Guyana brought to the country is expected to be fully connected and operational before Christmas, thus eliminating power outages during the holiday season.

Prime Minister, Brigadier (Ret’d) Mark Phillips toured the ship on Sunday morning in company of Guyana Power and Light (GPL) officials.  While providing an update to the media at the ship, docked at the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) terminal at Ruimveldt, he shared that power will be available, as planned, for Christmas.

“In keeping with our promise to the people of Guyana, we said we are going to bring additional power for Christmas. Based on the briefing that I received this morning, we are on target. Soon we will be connecting to the ship,” he said. He appealed for patience on the part of those people, who are suffering from power outages as a result of this project. “It’s a controlled power outage to ensure that we connect and test, so when we are ready to evacuate, it will be a smooth evacuation of power and everybody will have more electricity, more power for Christmas.

“This is the hard part. We are asking the people to bear with us. We know the inconvenience being caused by this project. All things being equal, there will be no blackout for Christmas; no need for low shedding,” he added. Head of Executive Management of GPL Kesh Nandlall said no major issues are anticipated in starting up the ship.  “We are here at the shipping terminal where the interconnection from the power ship has already been done from the new transmission line we have built. We have to do some testing… we are doing our protection testing and we have to do some capacity testing on the vessel,” he explained.

Bharat Harjohn, Deputy CEO Strategic Operations at GPL, informed that the length of the line that is connecting the power ship to the substation is about 3.5 kilometers.  “We have about 22 structures. We have also a double circuit coming from the power ship to the substation. This power will be injecting at the new Georgetown substation and the remainder would go to our Sophia location which will interconnect to the entire grid.”

According to him, the final connection of that line should be completed today and testing will commence. They are also hoping to start up the engines and do all the preliminary checks to ensure readiness. This power ship will add a crucial 60 MW of power to the national grid. Kalpataru Projects International, one of India’s largest engineering and construction companies, has been contracted to manage the power ship. Initially, the power ship will contribute 60 megawatts of generating capacity to the grid. In its second phase, an additional 15 megawatts will be added, bringing the total to 75 megawatts.

The power from this ship will add to electricity already being supplied by another power ship. In May, a 36-megawatt (MW) power ship was sourced to feed power into the GPL grid, to help supply extra power needed locally and already. Already though, the demand for power has grown; as such, this second power ship was sourced. Beyond these power ships, which are more temporary power supply options, a major natural gas project is being developed. That project is expected to supply about 300MW of power, an amount nearly equivalent to current supply. (Newsroom)