By Breaking Belize News Staff (HP): Belize Electricity Limited is explaining why it has asked the Public Utilities Commission to double the Cost of Power Adjustment (COPA) cap from 5% to 10%.
If approved, the surcharge on customers’ bills would rise from 1.51 cents to 3.01 cents per kilowatt hour.
BEL Executive Chairman Lynn Young told the media that the company’s diesel costs have nearly doubled this year.
“At the start of the year, diesel price for us, for BEL, was $6 a gallon, and now it’s close to $12 a gallon. So at that time, we thought we would see maybe a 20, 25, even a 50% increase in our prices. It’s almost doubled. So that was something that nobody could have planned for, of course,” Young said.
He added that Mexico’s power supplier, CFE, has also raised its prices because it generates much of its electricity with natural gas, which has been climbing in price.
On top of that, CFE faced generation and transmission problems in the Yucatán Peninsula, partly due to heavy demand during the hot season. Young said CFE curtailed supply to Belize far more than ever before, with more than 100 hours of curtailment in September alone.
That shortfall led to load shedding across the country and forced BEL to rely more heavily on its own diesel generation.
Members of the public can submit comments on BEL’s COPA application to the PUC at [email protected] by 4pm on November 17, 2026.
The post BEL says your light bill could go up because fuel and imported power now cost much more appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
By Breaking Belize News Staff (HP): Belize Electricity Limited is explaining why it has asked the Public Utilities Commission to double the Cost of Power Adjustment (COPA) cap from 5% to 10%. If approved, the surcharge on customers’ bills would rise from 1.51 cents to 3.01 cents per kilowatt hour. BEL Executive Chairman Lynn Young
The post BEL says your light bill could go up because fuel and imported power now cost much more appeared first on Belize News and Opinion on www.breakingbelizenews.com.
