Mabaruma solar farm to be operational month-end - Patterson
Works to rectify faults at the Mabaruma Solar Farm in Region One (Barima/Waini) are currently being undertaken as the Ministry of Public Infrastructure aims to have it up and running by the end of this month, de facto Minister David Patterson says.
Speaking to Stabroek News last week, Patterson explained that a contractor is currently executing works on the $227 million solar power farm, which has been under construction for at least three years.
“We have had some deliberate vandalism during the political season [elections] but the parts are here now and the contractor is on the ground working,” Patterson informed Stabroek News.
He explained that due to the novel coronavirus outbreak, work has been progressing slower than they would have liked as there are less employees on the ground. Patterson, however assured that “works are on track and we should have connection at the end of this month. The farm should be up and running by then.”
According to the de facto minster, the scope of work entails the reinstallation of the fibre optic cable that was damaged and installation of an inverter and additional batteries.
A new contract was awarded for the rehabilitative works after the ministry was forced to terminate the services of a German contractor, Meeco Group for substandard work. The Ministry in a letter to Stabroek News on October 17, 2019 had explained that it terminated the contract with the German contractor due to a number of factors. “Most significantly, severe weather conditions causing damage to the electrical infrastructure – the timeframes were not met.”
Regional Chairman Brentol Ashley had told Stabroek News in December last year that he observed remedial works had begun approximately three months before.
“The solar farm [capacity] is 4.0 megawatts and the batteries is 4.0 megawatts [and] when anything happens it would trip the system. So we have procured additional batteries which would charge it up to 6 megawatts and make sure the system becomes very stable,” he had explained back in December. Patterson was however quick to note then that the final phase of the work is being done at no additional cost since money that was approved and remained from the terminated contract is being used.
“This is being done at no extra cost. The balance from the remaining part of the terminated contract is what is being used to fund the completion. Before Republic Day it should be up and running because it is just a matter of installing the batteries and connecting it,” the Public Infrastructure Minister had said on December 28 last year. The solar power farm was to have been operational since August, 2018.
The Mabaruma Solar Farm was described in the 2017 national budget as the first of several such farms which were to be established under the Hinterland Electrification Programme.
Minister of Finance Winston Jordan announced at the time, a budgetary allocation of almost $1 billion to implement a series of renewable energy and energy efficiency projects.
He said these interventions which are to be channelled through and managed by the Guyana Energy Agency, would include the installation of the first solar farm on a large scale in Mabaruma. When operational, the 400-kilowatt solar farm would afford an additional 17 hours of electricity to the 3,000 residents of Mabaruma.
Chief Executive Officer of the Hinterland Electrification Company Incorporated (HECI), Horace Williams had been reported in the October 17, 2019 letter as saying that once the structural aspect was completed, the installation and testing aspect was commenced to verify the equipment’s performance when it was discovered that the systems were not working as required.
The contractor was engaged by the Ministry about the performance of the systems, but was reluctant to carry out further works to rectify the issues. “We ended up in a dispute with the contractor about whose responsibility it is to replace these items following the lightning strike. We concluded that the contractor was responsible because the contract stipulated that they were supposed to provide equipment to safeguard against these types of things,” Williams had clarified in the letter to this newspaper.
He emphasised that the Government Electrical Inspectorate conducted a test on the grounding of the lightning protection systems and found that these did not meet the specifications. As a consequence, he said, the company acknowledged that the contractor failed to meet the terms of the contract, which was subsequently terminated in September 2019, despite numerous efforts to amicably resolve the matter.