If you saw your community listed on BEL’s tentative outage schedule, it does not necessarily mean your lights will go out. BEL says the schedule released on Tuesday is only a precaution as the utility continues to monitor the possibility of reduced electricity imports from Mexico’s CFE. The company says it cannot predict exactly when, or even if, load shedding will be needed because the shortage may not happen or may change in severity. If outages become necessary, BEL says it will disconnect feeders in sequence to keep the grid stable, protect critical services and share the burden fairly across communities. We asked BEL Executive Chairman Lynn Young to explain what customers should expect.
Lynn Young
Lynn Young, Executive Chairman, BEL
“In the evening between seven and nine, we get our peak demand. And during those times, if we can’t get supply from Mexico, then we are short of capacity in country, and so then we will have to shed load because, we just can’t meet the, the demand. When it happens CFE would give us notice that they are having some issues and that they may have to ask us to stop taking power from them. Now, when we get that notice from CFE, we put out a notice to our customers that this may happen. So a few days ago we got a notice from them that they may have to not supply us. It turns out that they did supply us, but not with as much as they normally did. So we had a small amount of load shedding that day. And most recently again, they gave us notice that they may have to disconnect from us. So we put out a notice to customers that this may happen, but they did not disconnect. They supplied to us so we did not have any load shedding at that time. We are aware of the shortage in the country, so BEL earlier this year got approval from the PUC to bring in emergency generation. It’s about twenty megawatts of generation. It’s actually twenty-four megawatts, but it’s twenty-four units of one megawatt each. But the contract is for them to provide at least twenty megawatts, and that is in the installation phase as we speak. We had originally expected it to be online sometime around now, but the supplier had had some logistics issues with shipping impacted by some of the events that’s happening internationally with the shipping and the war and all that. So there’s been some delays in putting that in place. But once that is in place, then if we have this kind of situation with CFE again, we shouldn’t need to load shed.”
In the meantime, BEL is encouraging customers to manage electricity use during peak hours between six and ten p.m. and to stay informed through the BEL App.
Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.
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