By 1984, the Guyana Government, after spending over a billion Guyana dollars on various aspects of the project, including

employment costs, and failing to acquire international financing, eventually decided not to proceed any longer with it. As a result, the plan for the aluminium smelter was also shelved.

US$840M Amaila Falls hydro project Govt. worried about penalties as deadline looms for financial closure
May 23, 2013 | By KNews | Filed Under News

Guyana could very well face penalties if Guyana is not ready for construction of the Amaila Falls hydro project dam by the deadline for financial closure this year end. Government is getting worried as the access road remains unfinished and as the financiers, including the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), continue their due diligence work.

A section of the Amaila Falls road under construction earlier this year. After several delays since a 2011 deadline date, the closure has been pushed back as the financiers awaited the road completion and demanded that the countrys power company take steps to ready its systems to take power from the 165-megawatt facility that is to be built at Amaila Falls, Region Eight. Guyana Power and Light must reduce its commercial losses. Questioned about the developments on the US$840M project, Guyanas most expensive ever, Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr. Roger Luncheon, said that given the validity of the Amaila Falls Hydropower Project agreement, financial closure, the access road to the facility, and the actual construction of the plant have to be delivered in a timely manner. The project is designed to reduce Guyanas dependence on fossil fuel for power with a huge chunk of its foreign earnings going back to pay for that. The framework agreement was signed on July 15, 2010 by the Guyana Power and Light (GPL); Sithe Globals Amaila Holdings, China Development Bank, and the China Railway First Group, the contractor. The agreement had set out among other things, the parties intention to reach financial closure within a stipulated time frame. Closure is now anticipated before the end of 2013 and is integrated with the other key component, the access road, Dr. Luncheon said during his weekly press conference today. The road to the site which requires upgrade of 110 kilometres (km) of new roads coupled with upgrades to 85 km of existing infrastructure, faced severe challenges with Government paying the price for not heeding warnings that its contractor, Fip Motilall from Synergy Holdings Inc., lacked experience in the road building of that nature. Days after taking office, the new Donald Ramotar administration in January 2012, fired Synergy Holdings for failing to meet contractual obligations. Government is banking on the hydro power to meet growing demands and spur growth in the manufacturing sector. Already, GPL is spending more than US$40M to rebuild aging transmission lines along the coastland to reduce technical losses. Also being built are seven sub-stations and a state-of-the-art control centre at Sophia that will allow the company to effectively manage power coming from the proposed Amaila

Falls hydropower site. The road to the project, including existing ones, is sometimes through harsh terrains and swamps. Already, since the termination of the US$15.4M road contract with Synergy, Government has also fired other contractors for failing to meet deadlines. It has since signed a contract for one of the most difficult parts of the road with China Railway, the hydro facilitys contractor for the dam and power station. Government would be more than mindful of the very real possibilities of breach of contracts with the parties for failing to meet the deadline and having financial closure this year.

Amaila Fails: Grin & Jagdeo Ltd. by Jud Lohmeyer

Why cant the OP Project Management Office provide accurate cost estimates for Amaila Falls Hydro? One very simple reason, they dont even know how high the dam will be. How is it possible to be ten years into planning Amaila Falls, in the process of building a $15 million access road and not yet even know how high the dam will be? If you dont know how high the dam will be, you dont know how much water will be stored behind it and cant finalize design, engineering plans and firm cost estimates. Nor can you calculate how much power the hydro plant will be able to generate or how much reserve energy will be held behind the damn for periods of drought. The OP Project Management Office is relying on UN carbon off-set grants to pay for the construction of the Amaila Falls Hydro project. Unlike Chinese grants, UN grants come with extensive requirements that must be met in order to secure funding. Two of those requirements are befuddling Amaila Falls project management and for one simple reason: the OP Project Management Office did not complete a detailed site survey prior to planning and seeking funding for the project. A detailed survey wont happen until the 200 foot wide access road is complete. What is the OP Project Management Office in mortal fear of discovering? 1: An endangered species, especially a lovely little red frog: no UN carbon off-set funding for projects disturbing an endangered species and/or habitat, 2: Insufficient water volume, ultimate electric power production, to forest area to be submerged by the reservoir. UN carbon off-set funding has strict limits on the amount of forest that can be submerged in the reservoir created for the hydro power plant. Makes sense, forest is already a carbon off set, you cant destroy all the forest for one power plant, that is not a carbon off-set. The OP Project Management Office knows that the forest area to volume is right at the UN carbon off-set limit. Until a very detailed and complete geographic survey is complete, OP Project Management cant be sure if it will be able to secure UN carbon off-set grants at all. If it can meet the limits it will require adjusting the dam height to meet the UN submerged forest limit.

This is one hell of a roll of the dice for a developing country. Will Guyanese be saddled with debt for decades to come for a 200 foot wide road to no where. Will Jagdeos lasting legacy be a failed LCDS strategy, Hydro project and Laptop boondoggle that will leave Guyana in debt and broke while Jagdeo Inc. enjoys retirement or will he stay in power and keep digging the hole deeper?

Few Guyanese believe for one single second that this project is about electricity. It has all the hallmarks of a massive embezzlement scam by the PPP. The size and scale of the debt is over and above the possible financial income that could be generated by a labour intensive economy relying on heavy electricity use by local industries. Guyana has none of that and is not equipped with a workforce that can compete on a global scale. Local consumption alone won't generate the kind of income that GPL requires in order to even sustain the monthly repayments. So the debt will increase instead of getting paid off. Originally Posted by Mr.T: Few Guyanese believe for one single second that this project is about electricity. It has all the hallmarks of a massive embezzlement scam by the PPP. The size and scale of the debt is over and above the possible financial income that could be generated by a labour intensive economy relying on heavy electricity use by local industries. Guyana has none of that and is not equipped with a workforce that can compete on a global scale. Local consumption alone won't generate the kind of income that GPL requires in order to even sustain the monthly repayments. So the debt will increase instead of getting paid off. That was gift from the Jagans to his party faithfulls.

Just as Jagan and the PPP moved to block Burnham's hydro project, the afc/pnc are returning the favor in kind. Think of what a great resource it would have been today if the UMDA project was completed by Burnham back then.

Originally Posted by BGurd_See: Just as Jagan and the PPP moved to block Burnham's hydro project, the afc/pnc are returning the favor in kind. Think of what a great resource it would have been today if the UMDA project was completed by Burnham back then. Again you lie. The AFC is not blocking the project. They are insisting on transparency and not another opportunity to raid the nations coffers by the leeches in the PPP. There has been no feasibility study, no

environmental impact study and not hard and fast financials for this project. As with all things with the PPP, it only exist as they say it is bur the world does not function that way. Maybe you do bur not sane people.

Burnham could not get his project going because he was a duplicitous fool who thought he could play the international community as he did Cheddi. He lost since none trust him to loan him money.

Contrary to what you fools harp on here daily, international funding for the PNC had for all intents and purpose dried up in the early 70's. Had it not been for the sugar subsidy there would be no cash for the government.

Again you lie. The AFC is not blocking the project. They are insisting on transparency and not another opportunity to raid the nations coffers by the leeches in the PPP. There has been no feasibility study, no environmental impact study and not hard and fast financials for this project. As with all things with the PPP, it only exist as they say it is bur the world does not function that way. Maybe you do bur not sane people. Burnham could not get his project going because he was a duplicitous fool who thought he could play the international community as he did Cheddi. He lost since none trust him to loan him money. Contrary to what you fools harp on here daily, international funding for the PNC had for all intents and purpose dried up in the early 70's. Had it not been for the sugar subsidy there would be no cash for the government. The bottom line is that they are blocking the project, the afc/pnc that is, no matter how you spin it. And that might not be a bad thing as we have heard from the experts in the afc/pnc that the cost to benefit ratio is unfeasible.

Again you lie. The AFC is not blocking the project. They are insisting on transparency and not another opportunity to raid the nations coffers by the leeches in the PPP. There has been no feasibility study, no environmental impact study and not hard and fast financials for this project. As with all things with the PPP, it only exist as they say it is bur the world does not function that way. Maybe you do bur not sane people. Burnham could not get his project going because he was a duplicitous fool who thought he could play the international community as he did Cheddi. He lost since none trust him to loan him money. Contrary to what you fools harp on here daily, international funding for the PNC had for all intents and purpose dried up in the early 70's. Had it not been for the sugar subsidy there would be no cash for the government.

The bottom line is that they are blocking the project, the afc/pnc that is, no matter how you spin it. And that might not be a bad thing as we have heard from the experts in the afc/pnc that the cost to benefit ratio is unfeasible. Guyana was a dictatorship. The US did not care if it was. It cared that it was not ensconced in the western block. The PPP could not do a damn thing. Burnham did himself in with his purely duplicitous ways. He was as stupid as the rumors were that he was smart. And no one in the AFC can say definitively the plan is a doomed. They do not have the data. The PPP alone has that. All the AFC could do in the best of circumstances is some comparative analysis and the suspicions are that this is another berbice bridge in the making. : ... international funding for the PNC had for all intents and purpose dried up in the early 70's. In the late 1970's to early 1980's. ... international funding for the PNC had for all intents and purpose dried up in the early 70's. In the late 1970's to early 1980's. The first five year plan failed miserably even though Arthur Lewis was its piolet fish. The only thing sustaining the PNC was the boom in sugar in the early to mid seventies. Guyana was a dictatorship. The US did not care if it was. It cared that it was not ensconced in the western block. The PPP could not do a damn thing. Burnham did himself in with his purely duplicitous ways. He was as stupid as the rumors were that he was smart. And no one in the AFC can say definitively the plan is a doomed. They do not have the data. The PPP alone has that. All the AFC could do in the best of circumstances is some comparative analysis and the suspicions are that this is another berbice bridge in the making. Given the current price tag as released by govt, the afc/pnc has determined that the project will not produce electricity competitively. I can only assume that the AFC/pnc believes that they can negotiate a better deal, at least by half of the current cost, to make the project feasible. It is easier to make these decisions on the outside looking in of course as all numbers are hypothetical.

As for the UMDA project, the project would have been completed had the Venezuelan govt not reneged on their agreement to the project and opposition from the Akawaios. This is from a PPP site of course, but I believe at least 1/2 must be true: