Why does Belize lose power?

12 September 2026 · Belize Pulse · 12 min read

If you live on Ambergris Caye you have had the evening: dinner on the stove, the fans slow, the lights go, and the phone lights up with “anyone else?” This post tries to answer the next question properly. Not “is the power out,” which Belize Pulse shows on the home screen, but why, and what would it take to stop.

Everything below is drawn from BEL’s own filings with the regulator, Cabinet briefs, and the local press. Sources are linked. Where the record is unclear we say so.

The short answer

Belize does not make enough electricity of its own, and the supply it buys from Mexico can be switched off with little warning. Roughly 40 to 50 percent of the country’s power comes from Mexico’s state utility, CFE, over a single 115 kV line into Corozal (Breaking Belize News, Jul 2026). When the Yucatán runs hot and short, Belize is cut first. When that happens in the dry season, with the rivers low and the sugar mills idle, the country’s own plants cannot cover the gap, and BEL starts switching off neighbourhoods in turn to keep the whole grid from collapsing.

That is the pattern behind April to June 2024, behind the countrywide blackouts of September 2025 and August 2026, and behind the load-shedding schedules of the past three weeks. BEL told the regulator on 26 August 2026 that it expects to be short of firm capacity in eight of the twelve months of 2027 and every month of 2028 (BEL emergency notice, Aug 2026). So this is not a bad month. It is the shape of the next two years.

How the lights get made

BEL, Belize Electricity Limited, owns the wires but, by law, almost none of the generation. It is the “single buyer”: it purchases power from producers chosen through the Public Utilities Commission and delivers it. Its chairman has complained in print that requests for more capacity “go back to 2013 and the required capacity has simply never been provided” (op-ed, May 2024). The regulator, for its part, rejected BEL’s proposed gas plant in 2024 and criticised its forecasts (PUC decision, Mar 2024). Who owns the planning failure is genuinely contested, and both are partly right.

What Belize has in-country, according to BEL’s own tables:

• Three hydro plants on the Macal River, Chalillo, Mollejon and Vaca, about 51 MW together and roughly a third of the country’s energy, but weak at the end of the dry season when the reservoir is low.
• Two sugar-mill plants burning bagasse, around 20 MW, that only run in crop season, roughly December to July.
• One heavy-fuel-oil plant in Orange Walk, 22.5 MW, which BEL says has had a third of its capacity out “for prolonged periods” since 2024.
• Two gas turbines that BEL itself owns, one at Westlake on the George Price Highway and one in San Pedro, about 48 MW of firm capacity between them, burning diesel at a price nobody wants to pay for long.
• A few megawatts of solar, and a rented block of diesel generators at Westlake costing roughly BZ$4 million a month (Love FM, Jul 2026).

Against that, the country’s peak demand is now about 130 MW, and growing. The World Bank’s summary is blunt: Belize “added no significant new generation capacity for more than a decade even as peak electricity demand increased by 48 percent” (Breaking Belize News, Aug 2026).

Who owns it has changed twice. Canada’s Fortis ran BEL until the government took it over in 2011; a 2015 settlement paid Fortis US$35 million and handed back a one-third stake (Amandala, Sep 2015). In October 2025 the government bought that stake and the three Macal River dams for BZ$256 million (Amandala, Oct 2025), renamed the dams Hydro Belize, and in January 2026 sold half of Hydro Belize to the public in an oversubscribed share offer (Love FM, Jan 2026). The grid is, for the first time in a generation, mostly Belizean-owned. That does not by itself add a single megawatt.

Why the lights go out

Three things go wrong at once, and any two of them are survivable.

Mexico curtails. CFE’s contract is for 51 to 55 MW, and it is interruptible in practice. In mid-2025 BEL forecast that CFE would actually deliver as little as 7 to 8 MW in June and July (BEL notice, Nov 2024). When the Yucatán grid itself collapsed on 26 September 2025, CFE was carrying 46 percent of Belize’s load at that instant, and the whole country went dark (Breaking Belize News, Sep 2025).

The dry season empties the rivers and idles the mills. From roughly March to June the hydro output falls and the bagasse plants are off. That is exactly when the heat pushes demand to its peak.

Something local breaks. One Mollejon unit out for maintenance, one unit down at the Orange Walk plant, and the margin goes negative. On 25 August 2026, BEL had about 103 MW available against an evening peak of 122 MW; the 19 MW gap tripped the protection system and the whole grid went down at 7:28 pm (Breaking Belize News, Aug 2026).

The 2024 dry season was the worst on record. In May 2024, domestic generation was about 95 MW against demand of 125 MW (Love FM, May 2024); BEL later told the regulator that customers “experienced supply interruptions due to insufficient generation capacity totalling more than 5 hours on average over the months of April, May, and June.” CFE was charging up to 65 US cents a kilowatt-hour that month against a retail rate of about 40 cents, and BEL lost BZ$17 million in May alone (Amandala, Jun 2025). Businesses spoiled stock, hotels refunded guests, and BEL confirmed there was no compensation (San Pedro Sun, May 2024).

Two different kinds of “the power is out”

It helps to tell them apart, because they have different causes and different fixes.

• Load shedding is deliberate. BEL opens a feeder on a published, tentative schedule, usually 6 to 9 pm or 9 pm to midnight, “to match available generation and prevent instability or collapse of the wider system” (Breaking Belize News, Aug 2026). If your street is on the list, it is coming; if the situation improves, it may not.
• A trip is automatic. When CFE drops without warning, BEL’s protection sheds load everywhere in a fraction of a second. These are the sudden dinnertime blackouts. BEL has restored them in one to three and a half hours.
• A local fault is equipment. The transformer that “was smoking” at Maskall and blacked out the whole island for more than 13 hours on 1 May 2024 (Amandala, May 2024), or lightning on the San Pedro line in September 2023. If the island is dark and the mainland is not, it is this.

Ambergris Caye: a bottleneck inside a bottleneck

Everything the island uses comes through one submarine cable, laid in 1998 and rated 17 MW, fed from the Maskall substation on the Old Northern Highway by an overhead line across marsh you can only reach by boat (San Pedro Sun, Sep 2023). Island demand passed the cable’s rating on 23 March 2024 and hit 16.6 MW that Easter (San Pedro Sun, Mar 2024). When the cable or the Maskall transformer is at its limit, BEL drops part of Feeder 2 or Feeder 3 until demand falls, whatever the rest of the country is doing (Breaking Belize News, May 2024).

The 21 MW gas turbine south of town is meant to be the island’s cushion. It was due in June 2024, lost two transformers in commissioning, and was declared online on 29 November 2024 (San Pedro Sun, Dec 2024). BEL says it runs at peak hours when the cable cannot keep up, and reported running it through the September 2025 and August 2026 events.

There is some uncertainty about the turbine. Every account of it running is a press report, and people who live near it say they have not heard it. We will make a real journalistic effort to find out what is going on, and report back in a follow-up post.

The real fix is a second cable, a 69 kV link costing around BZ$120 million, with US$40 million from the United States’ Millennium Challenge Corporation after its Belize compact was amended on 1 July 2026 (San Pedro Sun, Jul 2026). It was first promised for December 2025. As of this writing there is no published construction start or completion date. A 10 MW battery behind the downtown substation, for which BEL cleared the mangrove in January 2024, has also not been reported built.

What is being done

Honestly: a lot is planned, little is finished, and the dates keep moving.

• Now: rented diesel at Westlake, renewed for six months from mid-September 2026 at roughly BZ$4 million a month, with the contract ending February 2027. Cabinet approved a formal generation emergency on 2 September 2026, which lets the regulator fast-track new producers (Cabinet brief, Sep 2026). The Prime Minister says one new local source could be generating within six months and four or five within a year (Breaking Belize News, Aug 2026).
• 2026 to 2027: a 15 MW solar-and-storage plant at Buena Vista in Corozal, first proposed in 2013, contract signed July 2025, targeted for the end of 2026 (Amandala, Jul 2025).
• 2029: the big one. An 80 MW solar project with a 40 MW battery, run with the World Bank’s IFC, with five companies shortlisted and bids expected around October 2026 (BEL and IFC, Jan 2026). BEL counts it as 40 MW of firm capacity from 2029 “subject to no further delays.” A separate Saudi-funded 40 MW solar and battery project is pencilled in for 2030 after three years of delay (Love FM, Aug 2026).
• Uncertain: a proposed 50 MW plant burning ethane, approved by Cabinet for emergency procurement in October 2025, with no site, price or timeline published since and no place in BEL’s 2026 supply outlook. A Belize–Mexico working group formed in August 2025 to increase supply, with no firm contract announced. A link to the Central American grid, which the government itself calls “a lengthy process without immediate solutions.”

Two things worth keeping in mind as those dates arrive. Solar produces nothing at 7 pm, which is when the grid fails; that is why BEL counts 80 MW of panels as only 40 MW of firm power, the battery. And BEL plans against an 18 percent reserve margin when its own consultants recommend 28 percent for a system this dependent on rain and imports. Even in 2029 and 2030 its outlook shows margins of 2 to 4 percent in August to October.

What it means at your house

Reading a notice. Find “San Pedro,” then the feeder number and the named boundaries. Feeder 2 is the south-central town: San Pedrito, the DFC area, Escalante, part of Mahogany Bay, and the Pescador and Coconut Drive corridor. Feeder 3 runs north from the substation past the Boca del Rio bridge through San Mateo and Playa Blanca to Tranquility Bay. If your street is not listed, BEL is trying to keep your feeder up. The notice also says why, and that tells you whether it is a national event, a local generation limit, or the island’s cable.

Where notices appear. BEL posts on its Power Updates page and Facebook, the BEL 24-7 app, and the toll-free line 0-800-235-2273. The San Pedro Sun and Breaking Belize News repost feeder lists within the hour. Belize Pulse checks BEL’s Power Updates every 30 minutes and puts any island notice as a banner at the top of the home screen.

The trips do the damage, not the schedules. Sudden loss and the voltage swings on the way back are what kill fridge controls, routers, and pumps; one bottling plant lost equipment “despite having backup generators” (Amandala, May 2025). Surge protection on refrigeration and electronics, and a small UPS on the router, are the cheapest insurance on the island.

Peak conservation actually matters here. On the mainland, one household’s air conditioner is noise. On Ambergris Caye the margin above the cable rating is a few hundred kilowatts, and BEL’s protective cuts are triggered by the island’s total load. Shifting air conditioning and water pumping out of 6 to 9 pm is the one thing a resident can do that changes whether a feeder is dropped.

Backup, in order of cost. A power bank for the phone and router covers the one-to-three-hour trips. An inverter and battery sized for fans, a fridge, and lights covers a three-hour shedding window. A standby generator covers a Maskall-style day. Rooftop solar with a battery is now straightforward to license: systems under 3 kW only need to be registered, and net metering credits exports at BEL’s avoided cost (Love FM, Apr 2024).

Your bill. Since mid-2026 there is a “cost of power adjustment” line that rises and falls with what BEL pays CFE, capped at about 1.5 cents per kilowatt-hour each way. From September 2026, residential bills up to BZ$200 a month are exempt from GST, and the social rate covers up to 80 kWh (Cabinet brief, Sep 2026).

What we could not confirm

We could not read BEL’s own website while researching this; it refused the connection. The exact terms of the Mexico contract, whether the second cable has a start date, whether the San Pedro battery or the Caye Caulker link have been built, and the status of the ethane plant are all questions BEL and the government could answer in a paragraph. If you know, write to [email protected] and we will update this post with a note.

The one-line version

Until the solar farms, the batteries, and the second cable actually exist, the choice on this island is to get used to partial blackouts or to provide some of your own power. Plan for the first while you price the second.

Belize Pulse is independent and non-commercial. BEL is the only authority on outages; for live updates use its app, its Facebook page, or 0-800-235-2273.