BELIZE CITY, Tues. Jan. 28, 2020– Last week, Belize Electricity Limited (BEL) submitted its Full Tariff Review Proceedings (FTRP) to the Public Utilities Commission (PUC). At a media briefing this afternoon at the Best Western Belize Biltmore Plaza Hotel, senior executives of the company explained what the FTRP is all about and how the company arrived at the figures it has submitted to the PUC.
Apart from the PUC submission, BEL executives also used the opportunity to announce that the company is undertaking major capital investment of $300 million to enhance BEL’s product and services to consumers across the country.
BEL’S General Manager of Legal and Corporate Services, Dawn Sampson, explained the method that the company used to arrive at the figures it submitted in its FTRP to the PUC.
Sampson said the FTRP is an exercise that BEL does every four years in which the company makes efforts to project what the company’s sales will be and the cost of producing the power it sells to consumers.
“And of course we also take into consideration any adjustments that we need to make to account for what the actual cost of power was for the previous period. In carrying out that exercise, we arrived at the mean electricity rate that we project over the next four-year period by simply dividing what the projected costs are by the projected sales and then we arrive at the mean electricity rate,” Sampson explained.
She went on to say, “In reviewing BEL’s application, you will basically see that over the next four years, we are projecting an average increase of about three point five cents over the four-year period. Now while that is a projection—and I do want to emphasize that that is a projection—we also want to most importantly communicate that our objective is to ensure that we actually come in below the mean electricity rate that you see in our submission.
“So you are seeing that increase of three point five cents per kilowatt hour; our objective is to come in lower than that. Whatever savings we are able to realize as a result of our efforts, our intention is to pass those savings on to customers.”
BEL’s General Manager for Commercial and Retail Services, Sean Fuller, said, “Those investments we believe are critical to BEL being able to continue to operate efficiently, and to provide the level of capacity needed to serve our customers and to build the level of redundancy needed; for instance, we are investing in a new submarine cable to Caye Caulker; we are investing in a second submarine cable to the island of Ambergris Caye.
“Dawn mentioned we are making projections for $282 million in investments over the next five years. Those investments, we believe, are critical to BEL being able to continue to operate efficiently … to facilitate the growth in demand on the islands, and also for a redundant link for the two most popular destinations for tourists in this country.”
Fuller further stated, “We are also, in the next five years, going to be installing a second transmission line from La Democracia to Dangriga for redundancy and capacity growth in the south of Belize. We are also very aggressively going to build the necessary infrastructure to connect to the additional in-country solar sources of electricity. That is about forty-five megawatts of solar and additional twenty-five megawatts of LPG generation within the country.
“That gives us a lot of in-country stability as far as reliance on the Mexican supply for electricity, especially when the Mexican prices are high. We will now with these additional generation sources be able to better serve our customers as far as the demand needed to serve them during those periods of time.”
“So we are also doing quite a bit of investments in our grid to modernize the grid to prepare for distributed generation solar, also for the eventuality of electric vehicle transportation in the country,” Fuller pointed out.
Feature photo: (l-r) Dawn Sampson, BEL’S General Manager of Legal and Corporate Services and Sean Fuller, BEL’s General Manager for Commercial and Retail Services