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BEL's Chief Executive Officer was up first:

John Mencias - CEO, BEL
"You all would know by now, because we've been saying it over and over, that we plan to connect Caye Caulker to the national grid, via a submarine cable that loops through San Pedro. So up to San Pedro is connected to the national grid, and we're going to continue along with the same supply coming over to Caye Caulker. This is now scheduled to be completed, meaning that Caye Caulker should be on the national grid by the end of the first quarter of 2021, which is roughly, no later than 15 months from today."

"We had planned this project, actually, it's interesting, I was planning engineer at the time we first determined that this was a viable and necessary project back in 2008. And the plans then were to start to implement the project somewhere around 2013, 2014. For a number of reasons, the project has been delayed. But, I can assure you that the project will be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2021. In combination with the connection by submarine cable of Caye Caulker to the circuit that currently feeds San Pedro, we're going to bolster that circuit with an additional submarine cable coming from the mainland."

So, we've shown you what the BEL CEO had to say about the long-term plant to connect Caye Caulker to the national electricity grid. So, what are they going to do the meet the island's electricity demand for the 15 months leading up to that interconnection? Here's how BEL will keep the island supplied:

John Mencias - CEO, BEL
"The growth rate in Caye Caulker has been over 10%. That is huge. The demand is just jumping upon us. In fact, looking at it right now, we have 3 generating units going full blast, and we could barely meet the demand last night. In the past, we could have done that with 2 generating units. So, what we had decided before is that we would order an additional unit, brand new. And that should be in here - now, I want to admit that we had not planned to have it in place by two to three weeks' time. But, we definitely had planned to have it in place before Easter. But now, we have already expedited delivery, and that should be here in 2 to 3 weeks' time, and up and running. But in the meantime, we only have 3 units of the 4 that are in service. There is one that is down, and the timeline for bringing that back into service is either 3 days or 2 to 3 weeks. It's an electrical problem with the rotor, and we have not been able to determine fully. We have technicians working on it right now."

"We have located a gen-set from Aqua Mar, down in Southern Belize and that gen-set be on its way to Caye Caulker this afternoon. It should reach here tonight. However, that's bringing the gen-set to Caye Caulker. We have to now attach that on to the local distribution system. We hope to have that in place by Monday. So, we still have to deal with the weekend load."

"I am unable to promise that we might not have to have some outages - not to the extent that you had the other day - and again, I am depending on the machines to hold up. We have been trying to ensure that we don't overload any of the machines, or even take them near to their limit. So, for example, last night, the 3 machines that we have, together, the peak load that they can hold is about just over 2,000, and last night, we were just under 2,000."