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BEL has submitted what is known as a Full Tariff Review Proceeding to the PUC.  Basically, it's a forecast of how much the company will be spending to purchase power, and what kind of electricity rate it will need to charge you to sustain operations and get a fair return on investment.  

Now, with the cost of power from Mexico, and the cost of fuel both projected to increase, these are both driving up the cost of power.  Still, BEL says it hopes to keep your electricity rate constant, at least up until the end of 2020 - while investing in a reliable and resilient power grid:

Dawn Sampson-Nunez - GM, Legal and Corp. Services, BEL
"In reviewing BEL's application, you will basically see that over the next 4 years, we're projecting an average increase of about 3.5 cents over the 4 year period. Now while that is a projection, I do want to emphasize that is a projection, we also want to most importantly communicate that our objective is to ensure that we actually come in below the mean electricity rate that you see in our submission. So you're seeing that increase of approximately 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour, our objective is to come in lower than that. We plan to invest over 280 million dollars in our system over the next 4 years and the investments are designed to improve reliability to customers, reduce cost of power."

Sean Fuller - GM, Comm. and Retail Services, BEL
"Those investments we believe are critical to BEL being able to continue to operate efficiently, provide the level of capacity needed to serve our customers and to build the level of redundancy needed for instance, we are investing in a new submarine cable to Caye Caulker, we are investing in a second submarine cable to the island of Ambergris Caye."

The investments also include interconnection with new local generation sources to the national grid to reduce reliance on power from Mexico.

The full FTRP schedule is available at the PUC's office on Gabourel Lane, in Belize City and BELs headquarters.