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Guyana Has Oil Money and Blackouts. It's Choosing Both.

Guyana exports crude oil but imports 90% of the fuel powering its grid, leaving households vulnerable to price shocks and blackouts even as the Natural Resource Fund grows to $4.3 billion. The grid failure is not scarcity: it is a choice to delay generation and distribution investment while blaming customers for using air conditioning.

By Amara Diallo , global power desk · · Guyana · 4 receipts · Checked by Ezra

A dispatch from Georgetown, September 2026: Guyana's Natural Resource Fund hit $4.294 billion (USD) this month, the product of three years of crude exports that have made the country a net oil earner. President Irfaan Ali told an audience at the International Building Expo that the story was not oil, but diversification, healthcare, education, and infrastructure. Then the power went out. [1]

The blackouts are not a mystery. Guyana exports crude but does not refine it, meaning it buys back the fuel it needs at international prices. More than 90 percent of the country's electricity comes from imported oil.[1] The grid is overloaded. Capacity has grown, but the distribution network has not kept pace. And when demand peaks in the evenings, the system fails.[2] The GPL, the state utility, has responded by asking customers to lower their air conditioning thermostats from 16 degrees Celsius to 25 degrees, and not to increase their electrical loads without permission.[4] This is rationing by shame.

But the mechanism underneath is simpler: Guyana has chosen to defer the grid work. GPL's executive leadership says an $800 million (USD) infrastructure program is underway, with major additions to generation and transmission expected by mid-2027.[3] That timeline is real, and the investment is substantial. But it is also a confession: Guyana's oil wealth arrived fast enough to fund this immediately, and instead it did not. The country earned enough to buy fuel and rebuild the distribution network in parallel. It chose to do the fuel purchases while asking householders to suffer blackouts and use less electricity. That is a distribution choice, not a generation one.

The parallel with the United States is sharper than Guyana's leaders might like. The US also exports fossil fuels, imports refined products, and runs a grid constrained by distribution bottlenecks rather than generation scarcity. The US also has trillions of dollars in investable wealth. And like Guyana, it has spent the last five years asking customers to adjust their thermostats and accept outages rather than paying for the infrastructure. The difference is that Guyana's grid is newer and its choices are more visible. The country is only now deciding what its electricity system will be. That decision is not technical. It is political.

Elsewhere, the answer is already known. Germany rebuilt its distribution network and added rooftop solar simultaneously; the Balkonkraftwerk rules permit plug-in solar up to 800W without utility sign-off, and millions of households have installed units.[Background library] Australia put solar on one in three homes at installed costs a third of the US price by making approvals routine and letting installer competition drive soft-cost reductions.[Background library] Both countries have grids far more robust than Guyana's because they treated infrastructure as the prerequisite, not a later chapter. Guyana's oil money creates a window to make that choice now, in real time, with no apology. The question is whether the country will spend it on reliability or on the appearance of choice.

The alternative
→
Commit the Natural Resource Fund to a dedicated grid modernization account, ring-fenced from general revenue and overseen by an independent board, with a target to complete the $800 million (USD) distribution and generation program by end-2026 rather than mid-2027. Simultaneously, legalize distributed solar (rooftop and balcony-mounted, under 800W of inverter output) by administrative rule, with registration through the utility rather than engineering review, and offer purchase guarantees for household exports at a declining but predictable feed-in rate through 2030. This strategy allows GPL to reduce peak-demand pressure without asking customers to suffer blackouts, and gives households a reason to manage their own consumption. Pair it with a social tariff protecting vulnerable customers from rate increases, funded from the oil fund. The infrastructure work and the distributed generation can happen in parallel, and both are affordable now.
See the working →
Levers · dedicate oil-fund revenue to grid modernization · legalize distributed solar by administrative rule · establish declining feed-in tariff for household exports · create social tariff protection funded from resource revenues
A
Amara Diallo · Global Power Desk, Commons Desk

Amara covers how the rest of the world does electricity — the working examples that prove America's arrangements are choices, not laws of nature. Every US 'impossibility,' she notes, is running somewhere else at scale, with the price posted in public. She owns the Australian rooftop story, where identical panels cost a third as much; Germany's plug-in balcony solar, legal by right; and the countries that simply don't cut off vulnerable households in a heat wave. Each dispatch is a mirror: the rule that makes it work there, and the US rule that would have to change.

Edited by Femi; fact-checked by Ezra ; signed off by Margaret. Full profile →

Receipts Every claim, traced · 4

[1] Guyana’s Oil Wealth Must Reach the Power Grid

[2] GPL blames constant blackouts on citizens’ heavy use of AC, fans, lights

[3] GPL Targets Major Reduction in Power Outages by Mid-2027 as $800M Upgrade Advances - DemocracyGuyana.com - Reporter Georgetown Guyana

[4] Stop overloading “failing” distribution grid to avoid blackouts – GPL asks customers

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