For the second consecutive year, Belize is grappling with scheduled rolling power cuts as persistent gaps in domestic electricity generation have left the national power grid highly sensitive to disruptions in imported supply from Mexico, reopening old vulnerabilities that policymakers have yet to fully resolve.
Belize Electricity Limited (BEL), the country’s main power utility, has confirmed that controlled load shedding measures have already been activated following two major system-wide outages in late August. These events mirror a near-identical crisis that impacted residential and commercial customers across the country in 2025, laying bare that critical gaps in the nation’s power generation reserves remain unaddressed.
The first major disruption unfolded on August 25, when BEL suddenly lost access to electricity imported from Mexico’s state-owned power provider Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE). At the time of the outage, operational domestic generation facilities could only output roughly 103 megawatts of power, while peak evening demand across Belize hit 122 megawatts — creating an immediate 19 megawatt supply deficit. To prevent a total, uncontrolled collapse of the entire national grid, BEL’s automated protection system triggered targeted load shedding across multiple regions to rebalance supply and customer demand. Full CFE supply was restored to the Belizean grid by 10:54 p.m. that same day.
Just six days later, a second major interruption hit the system on August 31. At that point, available domestic generation climbed slightly to 109 megawatts, but still fell short of the 117 megawatts customers were demanding. Once again, CFE’s cross-border supply was temporarily disconnected while domestic output was already insufficient to meet national needs, forcing a second round of controlled outages to protect grid integrity.
The return of load shedding comes less than 12 months after a nearly identical event in September 2025. That crisis was triggered by a major system collapse on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula that cut CFE supply to Belize, when domestic generation was already unable to cover peak customer demand. BEL implemented rotational outages for several hours until Mexican supply was reinstated just before midnight that day.
For context, load shedding is a deliberate, controlled utility practice that disconnects pre-selected sections of a power network when total supply cannot match customer demand. While the practice creates frustrating temporary outages for affected homes and businesses, it is designed to prevent cascading failures that could destabilize the entire national grid for a far longer period.
According to BEL’s official explanations, the ongoing supply shortage stems from a confluence of three main factors: seasonal shifts in demand, pre-scheduled maintenance work on aging domestic generation infrastructure, and reduced output from several existing domestic power facilities. As early as October 2025, BEL formally warned national government authorities that Belize faced a high risk of significant electricity supply deficits throughout 2026.
That advance warning prompted the country’s Cabinet to issue an emergency declaration under the Public Utilities Commission’s Request for Proposal Regulations, a move that cleared the way for BEL to fast-track the procurement of temporary additional power generation capacity.
That emergency generation capacity is currently being installed at BEL’s Westlake power facility. The new temporary assets are on track to enter commercial operation by mid-September 2026, and will remain online for an initial six-month period. Once operational, BEL officials note that the extra capacity will act as a buffer during periods of peak customer demand, or if another major cross-border supply disruption occurs in the coming months.
However, until the new emergency capacity comes online, BEL has issued a public warning that additional controlled power interruptions may still be necessary to protect the overall stability of the national grid if unexpected large-scale supply losses occur.
The root of Belize’s immediate vulnerability lies in its heavy dependence on CFE imports to cover gaps between domestic generation and peak demand. Recent system disruptions in southeastern Mexico have impacted the regional transmission network that supplies power to Belize, meaning even short interruptions on the Mexican side can quickly become a crisis for Belize when the country holds too little domestic generation reserve to cover the gap.
Far from being two isolated, one-off technical failures, the August 2026 outages confirm a concerning pattern: for the second year in a row, Belize has entered a period where available domestic generation cannot independently meet national peak demand. That reality forces BEL to rely on imported power from Mexico, and leaves the country with no option but to implement disruptive load shedding whenever that imported supply is temporarily cut off.