Stop overloading “failing” distribution grid to avoid blackouts- GPL asks customers

Last Updated on Monday, 7 September 2026, 20:03 by Written By Denis Chabrol

The Guyana Power and Light (GPL) on Monday appealed to Guyanese to adjust their air conditioning units and not to increase the amperage rating of their fuses without permission, as part of efforts to ease the pressure on the grid during peak consumption periods of the intensely hot El Nino weather.

“So we are encouraging all our customers who are increasing their load to notify us and we will facilitate that increase when we build infrastructure so that we prevent these things from happening,” GPL’s Head of Executive Management, Kesh Nandlall told a news conference He said the power company has sufficient generating capacity but blackouts in recent days have been caused by increased load.

Mr Nandlall also urged Guyanese to operate their air conditioning units at an average of 25 degrees Celsius instead of 16 degrees. “Putting your AC at 16 degrees makes a big difference on to the load. I don’t want you to practice that. For every degree you go up, you save 5% consumption on that unit,” he said.

GPL’s Deputy Chief Executive Officer Bharat Harjohn said in most areas customers were increasing their breaker size to cater for air conditioning units, resulting in increased demand from transformers, low voltage and eventually the feeders would protect themselves by tripping. “What we found is that because most of our feeders are tripping right now because of overloading conditions,” he said.

He said the peak demand has moved from 221 megawatts last year to 257 megawatts on September 4, 2026. Currently, he said GPL has 265.6 megawatts, and by Wednesday another five megawatts would be added to the grid.

Mr Nandlall said feeders were now being overloaded and transformers “taxed and overloaded.” “The reality is that the distribution system is now facing challenges,” he said.  He explained that peak demand is between 7 PM and 9 PM when everyone is at home and begins switching on air conditioning units “Since the sun is so hot in the day, and a lot of houses, including mine-and I’m speaking from personal experience here, including my home- is concrete and what happens is that the concrete absorbs this heat and releases the heat in the afternoon and when it starts to cool, the house is still hot. So everybody goes literally switch on at the same time,” he said. Despite the replacement of about 5,000 transformers, he said the problem continues to persist.

Touching on last Saturday night’s outage, the GPL Deputy Chief Executive Officer said that was due to problems at the Kingston substation where a 35 megavolt-ampere (MVA) transformer developed an electrical fault and the protection system kicked in and shut down generators. He said because it took some time to restore power, more power was lost from the Garden of Eden power station, cascading additional areas into blackout. He said technical personnel were continuing to address that issue.

Monday morning’s outage was attributed to a “heavy spike” in current on the Kingston to Vreed-en-Hoop submarine cable, tripping two transformers at those power stations. “Now we are presently investigating that to get to the root of that spike in the system that would have caused the system to protect itself,” he said. Mr Harjohn said part of GPL’s challenge is that “we don’t have the spinning reserve in the system” to deal with fluctuations if generators trip out.

The power company’s Divisional Director of Engineering Services, Ryan Ross said US$800 million was being invested in running 30 kilovolt and 69 kilovolt transmission lines and 350 kilometres of distribution lines for the medium voltage network. “That will address the immediate problems that Bharat referenced with overloading of feeders so we are doing it at a much higher specification,” he said. Mr Ross said the amount of money being invested in GPL’s “massive buildout” is the highest since the 1960s.

Though a total of 25 megawatts of generation capacity is off-grid due to maintenance, Head of  Generation and Support Services Gary Hall said at any given time units are off for that reason. He maintained that GPL has sufficient output but the transmission system remains weak. “We have capacity. It’s just the distribution network that is failing us at this point,” he said.