Tonight, Belizeans in communities all across the country should have their candles, flashlights and fully charged cell phones ready because BEL today announced a dense schedule for land shedding - which, in small change, means "blackout".

At around noon, the company put out a 24 hour schedule for rolling outages going from 10 am to midnight and the same is expected for tomorrow. This was required after CFE in Mexico told the utility "no mas" for Thursday and Friday.

That prompted a press briefing today at the Biltmore where executives discussed the current crisis and the communities that are going to be affected by outages.

John Mencias, CEO - BEL
"CFE has agreed to supply us about 20 megawatts up to 3:00 this evening. It's 3:00 already. But as of 3:00, they're going to cut it down to zero, which means that we'll have to take off even more feeders throughout the country."

Jose Moreno, General Manager, Energy Supply & Transmission
"Based on the generation availability at that hour. And given the restrictions imposed to us by, you know, the lack of supply from the lack of adequate supply from CFE and our own generation sources, then we establish a plan taking into consideration areas that we can work on, that we can do early, where it is better to do it later at night."

"And also we take into consideration the size of those areas, the size of those feeders. Belize City, I know it's a business district, so we try. We're trying to if we need to, because we need to right now, especially right now at 3:00, we're going to be short of 30 megawatts. In that case that calls for the outage of an entire Belize City."

"We're not going to do that. So if were touch areas in Belize City, we'll do it at an earlier time than what we will do on a rural area, Right. So I think we have prepared a proposed schedule that I think customer care and PR have already shared with with our customers and employees. And if the load materializes, if those restrictions continue, then those loadshedding schedules are affected."

"So it's something that is fluid."