Energy Is Economics — Until the Bill Comes Due in Linden

Energy Is Economics — Until the Bill Comes Due in Linden

OPINION BY: Staff Writer— September 2026

Peter Ramsaroop stood before Caribbean Energy Week and delivered a formula clean enough to fit on a slide: “Energy is economics.” The cost, reliability and availability of power, he said, determine what a nation can produce, what it can export, and how competitive it becomes. He is not wrong. It is, in fact, one of the more honest sentences to come out of a Guyanese government platform this year. The trouble is that Mr. Ramsaroop delivered it as an investment thesis for 2027, aimed at capital, LNG buyers and regional integration planners — while the government he speaks for has spent 2026 failing to apply that same formula to a town two hours down the highway.

If energy is economics for a refinery, a data centre or a manufacturing cluster courted at a Marriott ballroom, it is economics for a Linden household running a freezer off a generator during rolling blackouts. It is economics for the shop that cannot keep product cold, the clinic that cannot guarantee refrigerated medicine, the student doing homework by phone-light. The Chief Investment Officer’s framework does not stop being true at the Soesdyke-Linden Highway. It simply stops being applied there.

THE NUMBER THE SLIDE DECK SKIPS

This newsroom has already put the arithmetic on the record. At roughly 900,000 barrels a day and a government take of 39.8 percent post-cost-recovery, Guyana’s oil revenue runs near $26.9 million a day — better than $1.1 million an hour. Linden’s power shortfall, by GPL’s own numbers, is under 1 megawatt against a town of roughly 40,000 people. This is not a resource-constrained state pleading capacity limits.

This is a treasury collecting over a million dollars an hour that could not, on its own initiative, close a sub-megawatt gap; until a private mining company, Bosai, stepped in with generators the government itself is supposed to regulate.

That is not partnership. That is abdication dressed up afterward as ceremony — and it was this newsroom’s own framing when GPL, Bosai and Guyana Manganese Inc. signed their generator donation in August. The same logic applies here with more force, because Mr. Ramsaroop’s speech makes the omission harder to excuse. He has now put the state’s own theory of energy value on paper. He has conceded, on the government’s behalf, that energy access is the precondition for competitiveness, for participation, for wealth creation.

Region Ten is entitled to ask why that precondition has been denied to it for years while GPL’s own solar pipeline for the area stretches out toward 2028.

WHOSE COMPETITIVENESS, EXACTLY?

Read closely, the Caribbean Energy Week pitch is addressed to a very specific audience: policymakers, investors, energy leaders, industry stakeholders. It promises that lower energy costs will make “industries that were previously difficult to establish or expand” commercially viable — manufacturing, agro-processing, logistics, tourism. Every one of those sectors requires ordinary citizens as workers, suppliers and consumers before it requires foreign capital. A poultry cluster, a bean storage facility, a hinterland tourism circuit; all recent government initiatives this news media  has tracked ; depend on the same reliable power the state cannot yet guarantee its own regions.

You cannot build the industries of the energy dividend on top of a population still waiting for the energy.

 

So we ask it plainly, in the prosecutorial terms this policy invites: Is “energy is economics” a governing philosophy, or is it a marketing line reserved for foreign delegations? If the formula is real, does it apply to the citizen of Linden with the same weight it applies to the LNG investor being courted for July 2027? If the government believes, as it now says it does, that energy determines competitiveness, participation and wealth — what is its account of the years Linden spent without that competitiveness, that participation, that wealth, while the state collected record hydrocarbon revenue in the interim?

Mr. Ramsaroop closed his remarks by framing the real question as” no longer how much energy Guyana can produce, but what can be built because of it, and how ordinary people participate in the wealth it creates?” This publication agrees with the question. It simply notes that Linden has been asking it for longer, and has yet to receive an answer that did not arrive by way of a mining company’s donated generators.

Energy is economics. The government has now said so itself. It owes the country an explanation for why that principle governs its pitch to investors and not its obligations to its own citizens.

— THE BOARD