HGP Nightly News – Guyana’s economic transformation is being measured not only in barrels of oil or dollars of investment, but in megawatts and the numbers are staggering. Peak electricity demand has more than doubled in just five years, leaping from 120 megawatts in 2020 to 236 megawatts by the end of 2025. It is a 100 percent increase, a figure that speaks to the sheer velocity of change coursing through the nation’s economy.
Speaking on day three of the 2026 Guyana Energy Conference, Guyana Power and Light CEO Kesh Nandlall painted a picture of a utility scrambling to keep pace with a country that is growing faster than anyone predicted. The company now serves 244,000 customers, up from 201,000 in 2020, a 21 percent increase that reflects both the government’s aggressive housing drive and the expansion of commercial activity across every sector.
“We had to really move very quickly to meet this increase in demand,” Nandlall told the audience at the Marriott Hotel.
Move quickly they did. Since 2020, GPL has added more than 186 megawatts of firm capacity to the grid. The additions read like a catalogue of urgent expansion: 46.5 megawatts at Garden of Eden, 28.9 megawatts at Columbia, a 36-megawatt power ship in the Berbice River, and 60 megawatts of powership capacity in the Demerara River. More recently, 18 megawatts of solar have been integrated, 10 megawatts across three locations in Berbice and 8 megawatts at two sites in Essequibo.
The result, Nandlall assured, is that the Demerara Berbice Interconnected System now has approximately 260 megawatts of “reliable, firm” electricity available, excluding solar. Total installed capacity exceeds 300 megawatts, though maintenance schedules mean some generation is always offline. By the end of 2026, the CEO expects firm capacity to surpass 285 megawatts.
But the numbers that truly demand attention are the ones still to come.
Nandlall projected that by 2030, peak demand will reach an astonishing 1,650 megawatts. The implication is almost difficult to comprehend: Guyana’s electricity generation capacity will need to increase by 600 percent from today’s levels in just four years.
“What does that mean from now?” Nandlall asked. “Six hundred percent increase in our generating capacity from now to 2030.”
The drivers of this explosive growth are already visible. Existing customers are consuming more power as businesses expand and households acquire more appliances. New customers are connecting to the grid at an unprecedented rate, fueled by the government’s rapid development of housing areas and the expansion of industrial zones. Every new home, every new factory, every new commercial enterprise adds to the demand that GPL must meet.
