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In related news, Prime Minister John Briceño says delays in getting major energy projects underway have been among the concerns he has raised during meetings with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Bangkok, Thailand. Speaking with Love News, Briceño explained some of the obstacles affecting implementation as Belize works to increase electricity generation and strengthen the national grid. Among the projects discussed was the Saudi Fund for Development-backed solar investment. Belize signed a seventy-seven-million-US-dollar loan agreement in August 2023, originally intended to finance sixty megawatts of solar generation and improve the reliability of the electricity network. In explaining the delays affecting energy investments, Briceño said funders had received incorrect information about the location allocated for battery storage. According to the Prime Minister, that misunderstanding caused a significant delay in moving the project forward. He said he has brought these implementation difficulties directly to the attention of international partners during his meetings.
John Briceño, Prime Minister of Belize: “We have this proposal alone that we’re doing with the IMF, it’s for $50 million plus US for approximately 40 megawatts of solar storage. And it was already approved and about to be able to look at implementing the project or starting the project. And somebody made a comment that it was an iguana sanctuary and we had a squatter on the land that owned, that BEL owned. And because of that some faceless bureaucrat in Washington decided to put that project on hold. And it kept us back almost three years. If they would have taken the time to go to Belize and to see that this is not what had been said, then finally we finally cleared up with them but it has taken us almost three years to do that. We’d have already had battery storage and we would not have this shortage in electricity because then we could buy electricity from CFE in the early morning like around 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, one when it is available and secondly when it is very cheap and we could store it, and then in the evening during prime time we could use that and put it into the grid. So that’s one of the important things that we’re making across with the issue of energy and how important it is for us to be able to move away from diesel-powered energy to a more renewable source of energy, and certainly solar is one of them.”
The Saudi-funded project has since been redesigned to combine forty megawatts of solar generation with a twenty-megawatt battery system capable of storing eighty megawatt-hours of electricity. Government procurement documents outline that revised approach, which would allow some of the electricity generated during daylight hours to be stored for later use.
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