On November 3, 2026, the National Trade Union Congress of Belize (NTUCB) formally submitted a public submission to the country’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC), calling on the regulatory body to fully reject Belize Electricity Limited’s (BEL) pending application to double the Cost of Power Adjustment (COPA) cap from the current 5% to 10%.
The union’s submission, filed as part of the PUC’s ongoing public consultation process for the rate adjustment request, lays out detailed economic and consumer protection arguments against the proposed cap increase. NTUCB analysis estimates that lifting the COPA cap to 10% would push average electricity rates up by as much as $0.0301 per kilowatt-hour, a cost burden the organization says low- and middle-income Belizean households are completely unable to absorb amid a prolonged cost of living crisis.
Union representatives emphasized that local wages have failed to keep pace with surging consumer prices for years, forcing many families to make impossible trade-offs between paying their electricity bills, putting food on the table, and covering other basic necessities such as medicine and rent. Persistently elevated global fuel prices have already driven up freight and logistics costs that are baked into the price of nearly all consumer goods, and a rise in electricity rates would create a cascading second wave of cost increases as local businesses pass their higher utility expenses directly onto end consumers, the submission warns.
The NTUCB further challenges the core justification BEL has put forward for the cap hike. The electricity provider has openly acknowledged that a large part of its request stems from its growing reliance on costly temporary local generation, a measure deployed to mitigate widespread load shedding events triggered by unreliable power supplies from Mexico’s state-owned utility Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE). The union argues that it is fundamentally inequitable to force ordinary consumers to pay higher rates for a service whose reliability has already been severely eroded by repeated blackouts, rather than requiring the utility to absorb the costs of its own risk mitigation strategies.
The submission also notes that the COPA mechanism was originally established under a PUC Regulatory Sandbox framework that explicitly mandates robust consumer protection safeguards. The existing 5% cap, the NTUCB points out, was set only after extensive stakeholder consultation and rigorous cost analysis, and BEL has failed to present sufficient evidence to justify doubling that threshold. The union added that the two core challenges cited by BEL – elevated electricity import prices from Mexico and lower-than-projected hydroelectric output – are exactly the types of operational risks the existing COPA cap was designed to require the utility to manage through prudent long-term planning and internal cost controls, rather than unilaterally passing those costs onto the public.
Pay More for Light After Load Shedding? NTUCB Says That’s Not Fair
