As widespread rolling blackouts continue to disrupt communities across Guyana amid record heat tied to the El Niño weather pattern, a leading opposition lawmaker has leveled sharp criticism at the ruling Irfaan Ali administration, accusing officials of systemic failure to expand energy infrastructure to match the country’s fast-growing oil-fueled economic expansion.
Sharma Solomon, a parliamentarian with the A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) affiliated with the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR), pointed to government’s own official national data released last Friday to back his claims of poor long-term planning. He argued that the administration’s attempts to pin widespread power shortages entirely on El Niño-driven higher demand for cooling are a distraction from years of delayed capacity expansion. Official figures show the number of customers connected to the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System (DBIS) surged from 204,000 in 2020 to 250,000 by August 13, 2026, while total peak demand has jumped 21.6 megawatts (MW) over the past 12 months alone, rising from 221 MW last year to 242.64 MW this year.
“The question is not whether government could have predicted the exact temperature on August 15, 2026,” Solomon said in a formal statement released Sunday. “The question is whether government should have been planning electricity capacity for a growing oil-producing economy. Of course it should.”
Solomon also outlined multiple strains on the national grid already acknowledged by Public Utilities Minister Deodat Indar, including overloaded distribution feeders engineered to carry 8–9 MW that are now operating far above their design limits. He noted that peak demand in Vreed-en-Hoop has hit 41 MW against a total available generation capacity of just 26.1 MW, while a major transmission line serving Region Five carries more than 25 MW, and the Garden of Eden transmission line has already reached its maximum thermal capacity. Emergency infrastructure upgrades, including new feeders and cables, are only now breaking ground, with some projects expected to take months to reach completion.
“This is precisely the argument that the APNU has been making. The government cannot invite growth, build houses, encourage industries, expand commercial activity and then wait until the electricity system is overloaded before you build the infrastructure necessary to support that growth,” Solomon added.
Government officials have pushed back against the criticism, rejecting claims of inadequate planning. Minister Indar noted that state-owned utility Guyana Power and Light submits annual long-term distribution and expansion plans to his office that forecast customer growth, projected demand trends, and other key planning metrics. “It plans way up into the future. It gives you customers’ expectations, demand line, every single thing they capture from their planning section so it’s not of a lack of planning,” he said.
Prime Minister Mark Phillips pointed to the under-construction 300 MW natural gas-fired power plant in Wales, West Bank Demerara as evidence of proactive forward planning, though he admitted the $2 billion project has suffered repeated construction delays that have pushed back its full commercial operation. “You can’t fault us on forward-planning because the forward planning that we did, this project should have been on stream long before now, and it would have been 300 megawatts and if we had the 300 megawatts, in keeping with the time frame, there would have been no need for rationing,” Phillips said. Indar added that project developer LINDSAYCA, a United States-based firm, has committed to bringing one 57 MW turbine online by the end of 2026 to help ease immediate supply shortfalls. He also noted that the ruling People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPPC) administration has added 196 MW of new generation capacity since taking office in 2020, and additional temporary generators are set to come online by the end of this month to push total national capacity to 280 MW.
The inland community of Linden has emerged as the frontline of Guyana’s energy crisis, with Solomon describing it as a “clear local example of this national failure” in planning. The town’s local utility, Linden Electricity Company Inc. (LECI), confirmed Sunday that it has been forced to implement scheduled rolling blackouts after extreme heat drove a massive spike in air conditioning use that pushed peak demand over the 15 MW threshold, outstripping the community’s total available generation capacity of 14.5 MW supplied by BOSAI Minerals.
“To prevent a total grid collapse and protect the system’s integrity, LECI has been forced to implement scheduled load-shedding during peak demand periods. These outages are being carefully managed to rotate across the community, ensuring that no single area bears the burden for an extended period,” the company said in a statement. Local authorities have also arranged for 35 local sawmills, major high-volume energy consumers, to shift operations to overnight hours between 10:00 PM and 11:00 AM when overall demand is lower. LECI is working on long-term fixes including a new 15 MW solar farm and negotiations to increase output from BOSAI Minerals.
Solomon highlighted that when the town’s current power purchase agreement was established in 2005, total local demand sat at around 6 MW. That figure grew to 12 MW by 2024 and has now reached 14 to 14.5 MW in 2026, as unplanned industrial expansion pushed far beyond the original capacity projections. He added that new industrial and commercial investment in areas extending toward Moblissa, paired with major road and infrastructure projects, have added additional temporary and permanent demand that the grid was never expanded to accommodate.
A longstanding subsidized electricity rate for Linden has also created unsustainable strain on the system, Solomon argued. Industrial consumers in the town pay just GY$12 per kilowatt hour (kWh), compared to GY$63–GY$65 per kWh charged to consumers in other parts of the country. He called on the government to implement proper rate classification for industrial users, warning that the current discrepancy forces ordinary residents to bear the cost of expanded industrial demand. Between 2024 and 2026, new industrial activity in Linden added more than 2.5–3 MW of new demand to the constrained local grid, a share Solomon described as far from insignificant.
“Government must properly classify industrial consumers and ensure that industrial growth does not become a burden on ordinary residents,” he said. “That is not insignificant on a constrained local system. It is quite significant, especially given that these industrial consumers are not paying the same rates that ordinary commercial consumers elsewhere would pay.”
Solomon reiterated that the core issue remains a lack of adequate forward planning as the government allows unregulated industrial expansion across the country. He emphasized that the APNU welcomes new investment, job creation, and economic growth, but development requires corresponding investment in core infrastructure to support it. “You cannot have unofficial industrial development without industrial capacity. You can not build industrial capacity on the back of a community electricity concession, forged out of a community struggle, without asking who pays for the additional demand,” he said.
Solomon closed by questioning why a country now collecting unprecedented oil revenues has been repeatedly forced to scramble to meet basic electricity demand, negotiating ad-hoc capacity increases with private suppliers, asking large industrial users to reduce peak-hour consumption, and urging ordinary residents to cut back on energy use when modern infrastructure should have been built years in advance.