Earlier, we told you about the SICA meeting in San Pedro in which the social programs were discussed to provide energy to 100% of the country's population. Well during that discussion, Keynote speaker, Joy Grant, informed the gathering about Belize's request for power initiative.
As we told you, the government and your electricity company are trying to increase the capacity of the national grid by introducing an additional 75 megawatts of energy. The 20 bids were officially tendered 3 months ago, and today, Grant discussed with us how far the process has gone in reviewing the programs which will be selected to produce that additional power.
Here's what she told us:
Hon. Joy Grant
"That started on May 29th and we got 57 applications, much more than we thought. We are happy about that because what that shows is investor confidence in the country and come in and say they would like to do a project. We did the first review and we brought that down to about half and then we did a second review that we had the socio-economic benefits from all of these that were on the short list and also the financial analysis because that's very important. If we are going to get new sources of energy it must be at a competitive price if not it does not make any sense, so we are at the point where all these analysis has been done. There is a small group of 3 with representatives from BEL, the Public Utilities Commission and the ministry working very hard on this and in the next 10 days the short list will be announce to the Belizean public."
"At that stage we go into negotiations because people have said well we have the money and we can do this. WE have to make sure that that is in fact so and these negotiations will take a month or so, and at that time we will be ready to look at when we could start to implement these projects that would have been chosen."
But as we reported regularly in our newscast, your electricity bill fluctuates. There are usually a group of factors which contribute to that variation, but one of them is the price of oil. As we've told you, the Mexican company, Commission Federal de Electricidad (CFE) uses oil to generate electricity, which it then sells to Belize.
Energy Minister Joy Grant told us that there are discussions to try to reduce the country's electricity dependency on the neighbours to the north:
Hon. Joy Grant
"On the agenda today is energy to SICA which has always been one of the major initiatives of this ministry. Seeing if we could come to the day very soon where we are no longer buying and dependent on getting energy but selling. But that does entail setting up the infrastructure - the lines because you have to have lines that will carry the load and that will mean significant investments. However, we are working both with the World Bank and IDB at looking at whether Belize could become a member, we are not and these discussions are quite advance but to your specific question of buying energy from Mexico, I said this morning that 57% of our electricity is from renewable sources. Now that is actually more than most countries especially in the Caribbean. If we could increase that and while keeping the cost down, we will be able to decrease our dependence on Mexican energy. Now that will not happen in the very short term. We are lucky that we always have this arrangement with the Mexicans. We are glad that the Mexican government is working with our government in this way because Belizeans don't have to worry if we have a very dry year and we don't have the hydroelectricity, we can always get from Mexico. But with time we would like to use bio-fuels which gives us energy on a more sustainable manner than hydro to bridge the gap and so that most of our energy will be coming from renewables and will bring down the cost and will make us more energy sustainable."
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