Belize Electricity Limited (BEL) owes Mexico’s state-owned energy supplier tens of millions of dollars, and the company admits it doesn’t have enough money to cover all its expenses on its own. Executive Chairman Lynn Young shared that the Briceño administration has been stepping in to help BEL meet some of those financial obligations.
“In early January it was about fifty-five million dollars. It is down to, I think, the last time I saw it was thirty million dollars, of which maybe about twenty are overdue. We have been in conversation with them continuously, and we have been bringing it down this year, with the help of the government.”
Young says the core problem comes down to the cost of power outpacing what BEL charges customers. “The company collects about six million dollars a week for all the revenue, and the diesel alone is about three million dollars a week right now. So we have to prioritise paying CFE, paying Hydro Belize, and the diesel, and of course we have employees we have to pay; we have contractors to pay. So it boils down to us using up all the resources, and that is how the company ended up in that position.”
He says the newly implemented cost of power adjustment will help but won’t close the full gap.
“I think the COPA adjustment will help, but it’s not; for example, last month alone the extra cost was like four and a half cents per kWh, and the COPA is just one and a half cents. So we will have to find that extra three cents. For that month, we are probably short about five million dollars, and again, the government has been assisting us in meeting some of these bills.”
Asked how Belize’s energy sector reached this point, Young defended the decisions that led here as reasonable given what was known at the time. “Nobody could have known that CFE would be having problems. I did not expect that either, because it is such a big system, and they are an energy-rich country. So nobody could have predicted that. It has been a while since we added generation to our system; it might have looked like a good decision back then because CFE was cheap and reliable, but now CFE is not working. But we all make decisions based on the information we have at the time. So, I don’t care to go back and see that it was not a good decision. That was a bad leadership decision. We have to look forward and move forward with what we have now. You play dominoes. You know what they say: you have to play the hand you’re dealt.”
Meanwhile, a separate seventy-seven-million-dollar solar project meant to strengthen Belize’s power supply remains stalled three years after the Briceño administration signed the agreement with Saudi Arabia in 2023. Public Utilities Minister Michel Chebat says the delay comes down to Saudi Arabia’s own approval process. “Unfortunately, the Saudis have a longer procurement process and more conditions you have to fulfil. As a matter of fact, I think one of their conditions is that you have to use Saudi engineers for many aspects of this project. So that is a little more involved. But I can assure you that we have our thumbs on this and we are pushing it as fast as we can.”
Chebat pointed to a separate agreement as part of the broader push to lower power costs. “We just signed a hundred and twenty-five million dollar compact with the Millennium Cooperation, and part of that really is to reduce the cost of power in this country, and so all of these investments are geared towards that. That we want it today and we should have it today, yes, absolutely.”
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