Guyana's $156.5M transmission build skips efficiency screening, here's what oversight looks like

Kaieteur News reported on September 17, 2026, that the new 69kV substation at Colombia, East Bank Demerara, is approximately 60 to 70 percent complete as part of a US$156.5 million project to strengthen power transmission to Onverwagt.^[1] The facility, awarded to Kalpataru Projects International Limited, is being constructed to expand and modernize the existing Colombia installation and improve electricity reliability in surrounding areas.^[1]

Guyana's grid urgently needs reliability work. The existing system has no redundancy; when a single transformer or transmission line trips for maintenance, customers lose power across entire zones.^[5] The GPL leadership team has now committed to building that redundancy into all future infrastructure projects, with alternative pathways so power continues flowing when equipment is offline.^[5][6] That commitment is sound policy. The question is whether the Colombia project itself was screened against it.

Before any transmission capital project reaches 70 percent completion, and certainly before its final budget is locked, the owner should have documented in the public record whether cheaper, faster alternatives were evaluated. Those options follow a standard hierarchy: dynamic line ratings (measuring actual thermal capacity instead of conservative seasonal assumptions, typically revealing 10 to 40 percent unused headroom on constrained lines); advanced power-flow control (rerouting flows around bottlenecks without new wires); topology optimization; advanced reconductoring (upgrading conductors on existing towers, roughly doubling capacity with no new right-of-way); and storage-as-transmission (evaluated as a wires substitute under FERC precedent where applicable). The screening matters because a utility earning a regulated return on capital has no financial incentive to choose any of these over a substation build. The regulatory structure supplies the perverse incentive; transparency and early screening supply the corrective.

GPL's public disclosures do not reference such a screening for the Colombia project. The originating report describes civil works, equipment shipments, factory testing, and a project milestone, but no cost-per-megavolt-ampere analysis comparing the capital path to grid-enhancing alternatives, no mention of independent feasibility review, and no statement of what constraint or reliability gap the $156.5 million is solving. For context: in 2014, GPL completed a prior infrastructure development project that included seven new substations and 96 kilometers of 69 kV transmission for US$42.8 million,^[3] suggesting capex per mile or per substation has risen significantly. That trajectory alone invites scrutiny of whether the current project is sized and scoped appropriately.

The remedy is straightforward and has a deadline. GPL's board and the Ministry of Finance (as lender of record for development-funded infrastructure) should commission an independent technical audit of the Colombia project before final close-out, comparing the delivered capital solution to documented alternatives and their cost per megavolt-ampere of reliability delivered. That audit should be filed in the public record within 90 days of project mechanical completion, with findings binding on any similar future project scope. The GPL team's stated commitment to redundancy should now be operationalized: a mandatory grid-enhancing-technology screening before any transmission capex approval, with the burden of proof on the capital path to show why it is cheaper, faster, or more reliable than the alternatives. Guyana's grid is small enough that such a process is administratively light and politically tractable; it is also the only way a monopoly builder internalizes the incentive to choose efficiency over expansion.