The Lights We Dim, The Loads We Court

The Lights We Dim, The Loads We Court

GPL’s “Unusual Demand” Was Never Unusual — And the Government’s Own Numbers Prove It

By The 592 Guardian Editorial Board

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Phillips stood beside Minister of Public Utilities Deodat Indar and GPL Executive Kesh Nandlall to announce that Guyana had reached an “unusual peak in demand for electricity.” Public buildings would switch off lights and air conditioning when not in use. 

Community floodlights would go dark during peak hours. Households were asked to conserve. Commercial and industrial customers — who together account for 70 to 80 percent of demand on the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System — were told to disconnect from the grid during peak periods.

The peak in question: 242.64 megawatts, reached two days before the announcement.

There is nothing unusual about it. This publication flagged the risk in May, when the El Niño pattern now cited as the proximate cause was already forecast. The government’s own utility had already told the country, in February, exactly where this was heading.

A Trajectory, Not a Surprise

Speaking at the 2026 Guyana Energy Conference in February, GPL’s Kesh Nandlall laid out the numbers plainly. Peak demand had more than doubled in five years — from 120 megawatts in 2020 to 236 megawatts by the end of 2025. The customer base had grown from 201,000 to 244,000. And the curve ahead was steeper still: Nandlall projected peak demand would reach 1,650 megawatts by 2030, a figure he himself described as a “600 percent” increase in generating capacity that Guyana would need to find in four years.

Set against that trajectory, this week’s 242.64-megawatt peak is not an aberration. It is the trend continuing on schedule. Indar himself supplied the comparison: the 2025 peak was 221 megawatts. This year’s is 21.6 megawatts higher — under a 10 percent year-on-year increase, consistent with a growth pattern GPL has been publishing for months. Calling this “unusual” requires ignoring the utility’s own forecasting.

The Diagnosis Doesn’t Match the Prescription

The more revealing admission came from Indar directly, and it undercuts the entire premise of the conservation campaign. Pressed on the numbers, the Minister was unambiguous: Guyana does not have a generation shortfall.

“We know we have enough generation to deal with the grid,” Indar said. “It is just different part of the grid that have peculiar problems with voltage that we have to do intervention at particular spots on the grid.” He repeated the point for emphasis: the country “does not have a power generation issue,” with 256 megawatts of capacity already available — set to reach 265 by Monday with the Garden of Eden addition, and 280 by the end of August.

If the problem is localized voltage faults at specific points on the grid, the remedy for that problem is targeted engineering intervention at those points. It is not a national directive asking households to turn off appliances, ordering community floodlights dark, and instructing major industrial users to physically disconnect from the grid during peak hours. Those are supply-side rationing measures, deployed against what the government’s own minister says is not a supply-side problem.

One of two things is true here. Either the conservation campaign is a blunt public-relations response to a narrower technical fault — treating a wiring and voltage-regulation problem as a generation crisis because that framing is easier to explain and act on quickly — or the “unusual demand” language was reached for before the voltage diagnosis was fully worked out, and the government is now managing the gap between the two explanations in real time. Neither is reassuring. Both point to the same underlying failure: a utility and a ministry reacting to a peak they had already forecast, with a response that doesn’t match the cause they’re now describing.

Where the New Industrial Load Fits

The conservation announcement did not happen in isolation. The same week, representatives of First Bauxite, Strategic Bauxite USA and ElementUSA were in Georgetown meeting with Indar on the electricity requirements of a planned bauxite mine expansion and new calcination facilities — a project backed by an $85.5 million U.S. equity investment as part of a wider $150 million package. Indar welcomed the talks as “an important signal for Guyana’s development.”

Commercial and industrial users already consume 70 to 80 percent of what the grid supplies, and they are the customer class currently being asked to come off the grid at peak. The government says that once GPL reaches its 280-megawatt target by month’s end, industrial users will no longer need to disconnect during peak periods.

What remains unstated is whether that 280-megawatt figure — or the 266 megawatts GPL’s own planners project as the peak for August through October — accounts in any way for the additional load a bauxite calcination operation would eventually draw. If it does not, the margin the government is describing as adequate is thinner than advertised the moment that project moves from technical talks to operating equipment.

The Foresight Question

This newsroom does not fault a utility for demand growth — growth is the point of the investment Guyana has spent years courting. The fault lies in treating a forecast as a surprise, and in reaching for a nationwide conservation order before the underlying technical problem was clearly identified and communicated. 

GPL had the growth curve in February. The El Niño forecast was public well before this month. The gap between knowing a strain is coming and being ready to meet it without asking public buildings to sit in the dark is precisely the gap this newsroom has been documenting across other sectors for months: the announcement without the infrastructure, the plan without the preparation.

Guyana can afford neither posture indefinitely — not with a bauxite calcination plant on the way, and not with GPL’s own numbers pointing toward a demand curve that makes this week’s 242.64 megawatts look, in three years, like the easy part.

— The Board