HGP Nightly News – After years of sudden blackouts that can be triggered by a single crash, a snapped pole, or one misstep by heavy equipment, the government is now pouring the bulk of this year’s energy spending into the weakest link of Guyana’s power system: the grid that is supposed to carry electricity to people’s homes.
That shift is reflected in the 2026 budget numbers. Of the $119.4 billion set aside for the energy sector, $66.2 billion, more than half, is being directed to transmission and distribution upgrades, according to Director General at the Ministry of Public Utilities and Aviation, Alfonso De Armas. In plain terms, the state is prioritising the lines, substations, poles and supporting infrastructure that determine whether electricity actually reaches customers when they switch on a light.
De Armas argued the country’s current problem is not that Guyana lacks generating capacity. He said the grid already has about 250 megawatts of reliable capacity available, and that more than 186 megawatts of new generation was added over the past five years. From his perspective, the outages people experience are typically not because the country cannot produce electricity, but because the delivery system is too fragile to keep power flowing consistently.
That fragility, he suggested, is why an everyday incident can ripple into a wide-area outage. He pointed to situations where a traffic accident knocks out a key pole, or where excavation work damages critical infrastructure, causing electricity loss across multiple communities. In his framing, these are not rare, technical failures; they are predictable consequences of a network with limited redundancy and limited ability to reroute power when something goes wrong.
The stakes rise even higher this year with the gas-to-energy project expected to come on stream, adding roughly 300 megawatts to the grid. De Armas warned that without a stronger transmission and distribution network, that additional power could amount to capacity on paper that still fails to translate into stable supply on the ground. His central point: more electricity means little if the grid cannot carry it reliably.
The upgrades, he said, are designed to change how the system behaves under stress. Instead of one failure triggering a cascading shutdown, the goal is to build redundancy, multiple pathways that allow electricity to be rerouted when faults occur, keeping more areas online while repairs are underway.
De Armas also linked the grid push to household costs, saying consumers are projected to see their electricity bills drop significantly, with costs projected to fall by about half once gas-to-energy is operational. He described that as direct financial relief for families and businesses, and argued the benefits should be felt not only in fewer outages but also in day-to-day expenses and economic activity.
As he put it, this is not meant to be a technical exercise for engineers alone, but an attempt to fix the part of the system that most directly shapes what consumers experience: whether power stays on, and what it costs when it does.
