Public Utilities Minister Deodat Indar appeared on the Starting Point podcast this month to reassure the nation that the Government of Guyana had not been outmaneuvered in its ongoing contract renewal negotiations with Turkish power company Karpowership. “No one should believe we were ever backed into a corner,” he declared. “We will defend the interests of the Guyanese people.”

The minister’s confidence deserves scrutiny — not because his rhetoric is untypical, but because the numbers embedded in his own account produce a conclusion he appears unwilling to draw. When those numbers are laid end to end, what emerges is not a portrait of a government defending its citizens. It is a portrait of a government presiding over a structural dependency of its own making, and reaching for the language of strength to describe the dimensions of its own trap.

The 592 Guardian does the arithmetic Minister Indar declined to offer.

I.The Rate Surrender: From 7.2¢ to 9.5¢

When GPL signed the first Karpowership contract in 2024 — the 36 MW vessel docked at Everton in the Berbice River — it secured power at 7.2 cents per kilowatt-hour. Indar himself called this “the lowest rate on the market at that time.” The second vessel, 60 MW at Meadow Bank on the Demerara River, was contracted at 9.5 cents per kWh. No public explanation was ever furnished for why the second ship cost 32 percent more per unit than the first, negotiated in the same calendar year, by the same government, with the same counterparty.

Now both contracts have elapsed. Karpowership is asking for 9.5 cents per kWh across the board for the renewal. The Government, Indar tells us, wants 9 cents. “We are working between that,” he said, which is the minister’s way of announcing that the floor established in 2024 — 7.2 cents, which he himself described as historically low — is simply gone. It will not be recovered. It is not even part of the conversation.

II.What the Minister Did Not Do: The Full Cost Calculation

Indar offered no numbers to the public beyond the per-kWh rates. He offered no annual cost figure. He offered no contract-total projection. He offered no per-household burden. The 592 Guardian provides what the minister withheld.

The two vessels together supply 96 MW of contracted capacity. At a standard capacity factor of approximately 85 percent — a conservative industry estimate for powerships operating as baseload or near-baseload supply — annual generation is approximately 713,376 MWh, or roughly 713.4 million kWh per year. The calculations below use this figure across all scenarios.

III.What Households Absorb

GPL does not operate on charity. The cost of purchased power — whether from Karpowership, InterEnergy, or any other supplier — flows directly to consumers through tariffs, to the Treasury through subsidy obligations, or to both. The minister did not address this transmission mechanism. The 592 Guardian addresses it now.

To be precise: these figures represent the Karpowership component of GPL’s power purchase cost. They do not include transmission losses, administrative overhead, or the cost of other purchased-power agreements. They represent the minimum exposure attributable to this single contract. The actual per-household pass-through, depending on GPL’s tariff review schedule and subsidy arrangements with the Treasury, may be higher.

In a country where the median household income remains below US$800 per month, an additional US$4.60 to US$5.90 in monthly energy burden attributable to a single contracted supplier is not a rounding error. It is a policy consequence. And it has a name: it is what happens when a government procures power on a short-term, sole-source basis from a foreign supplier, creates grid dependency, and then discovers at renewal time that its leverage has been structurally foreclosed by its own prior decisions.

IV.The Architecture of Dependency

Indar’s most revealing statement was not his bravado about defending Guyanese interests. It was his acknowledgment that “the vessel is here, it’s already hooked up to our system, we need the power.” That sentence is the admission the minister did not intend to make. It describes, with clinical precision, the conditions under which one party in a negotiation does not, in fact, have the options it claims.

A supplier whose infrastructure is already integrated into the national grid, whose disconnection would immediately affect 96 MW of national generating capacity, and whose contract renewal is being negotiated while their ships continue to operate, holds structural leverage that no amount of ministerial firmness in a podcast interview can neutralize. This is not a commentary on Indar’s competence as a negotiator. It is a structural observation about the procurement choices made in 2024 and the absence of any competitive tendering process that would have created genuine alternatives at renewal time.

The minister cannot have it both ways. Either the Government needs the 96 MW — in which case the supplier has leverage — or it does not need the 96 MW, in which case the minister should immediately explain to Guyanese consumers what the backup generation plan is, who supplies it, at what rate, and under what procurement mechanism it was secured. No such explanation has been offered.

What has been offered is the assertion that the Government “has options.” The 592 Guardian formally requests that those options be named, costed, and subjected to public scrutiny. The people whose household budgets underwrite this negotiation are entitled to that information.

V.The Gas-to-Energy Deflection

Both the minister and the Government’s public communications have consistently invoked the Wales Gas-to-Energy project — slated to deliver approximately 300 MW from offshore natural gas “later this year” — as the eventual solution to Guyana’s generating capacity deficit. The power-ships, on this account, are merely a bridge. This framing deserves direct challenge.         

The GtE project has been “later this year” for multiple successive years. Its cost trajectory, contractor complications involving Venezuelan-linked entities, and MOAP Inc. payroll irregularities have been documented in this publication and remain subjects of active public concern. Even accepting the Government’s timeline at face value, the question the minister has not answered is this: at what rate, and under what contract terms, will the two Karpowership vessels operate during the remaining window before GtE comes onstream? That window — measured at either 9.0 or 9.5 cents per kWh, for 96 MW, at 85 percent capacity — costs Guyanese consumers between US$64 million and US$68 million per year. The bridge has a toll.

Furthermore, bridging procurement that creates grid dependency without exit mechanisms is not a bridge. It is a foundation for the next renewal negotiation, in which the same structural conditions — hooked-up vessels, immediate need, no competitive alternative — will recur. Nothing in Indar’s account suggests the Government has contractual exit rights, performance benchmarks, or rate-cap provisions that would constrain Karpowership’s leverage at the next renewal point, assuming GtE delays continue.

VI.What Accountability Requires

The 592 Guardian does not allege bad faith on Minister Indar’s part. What we allege — on the basis of his own public statements — is a pattern of rhetorical deflection that consistently substitutes bravado for transparency, and that systematically withholds from Guyanese citizens the cost information necessary for informed public judgment about their government’s energy procurement decisions.

The minister is not “99 percent there” on a deal the public understands. He is 99 percent there on a deal the public has never been permitted to properly examine. That is a distinction with consequences — for parliamentary oversight, for GPL’s tariff review process, and for every household whose electricity bill will reflect the outcome of negotiations conducted, as Indar himself put it, away from public view.