HGP Nightly News – Guyana is facing an electricity challenge of historic proportions and the clock is ticking. The head of executive management at Guyana Power and Light, Kesh Nandlall, has revealed that the country’s peak electricity demand is projected to hit a staggering 1,575 megawatts by 2030. To put that in perspective, peak demand as recently as September 2025 stood at just 221.5 megawatts. GPL has less than five years to be ready for it.
Speaking at a Public Utilities Commission hearing, Nandlall laid out the numbers in plain terms. By September of this year alone, peak demand is expected to climb to 286.4 megawatts. From there, the trajectory becomes breathtaking, a projected 600% increase in generating capacity required by 2030, driven by a combination of explosive residential growth, new housing developments and an industrial sector that is expanding at a pace few could have anticipated even a few years ago.
The customer growth figures tell their own remarkable story. GPL ended 2025 with 244,000 customers, a 51% jump from the year before. But it is not just the number of customers that is growing. The demand from each individual customer is growing too, a trend Nandlall says points clearly to the rising presence of larger industrial and foreign customers plugging into Guyana’s grid and drawing significantly more power than the average household.
To its credit, GPL has not been standing still. Over the past five years, Guyana’s electricity generation has doubled, climbing from 120 megawatts in 2020 to 236 megawatts by the end of 2025, a 100% increase in half a decade. Total power generation across the Demerara Berbice Interconnected System jumped from 903 gigawatt hours in 2020 to 1,485 gigawatt hours, a 65% rise.
Last year alone, GPL added 182 megawatts of capacity to keep pace with surging demand. New capacity additions have come from multiple sources, including a 46.5 megawatt fossil fuel plant at Garden of Eden, a 28.9 megawatt facility at Columbia, a 60 megawatt power ship on the Demerara River, a 36 megawatt power ship in the Berbice River and 18 megawatts of solar power split between Berbice and Essequibo.
Today, the DBIS sits at roughly 260 megawatts of reliable firm electricity, with over 300 megawatts installed when accounting for units that cycle in and out for maintenance. By 2026, Nandlall expects that figure to push past 285 megawatts. It is progress, without question, but measured against the mountain of demand that 2030 represents, it is only the beginning. Guyana’s energy story is moving faster than almost anyone predicted, and the race to keep the lights on just got very real.
