GPL said approximately 10% of affected customers were repowered after the 12 September system disturbance in Demerara and Berbice. Commenters on its own notice named at least twenty communities still dark. The outage fell on Rosh Hashanah and Sabbath.
Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) posted its update to Facebook on Saturday 12 September. The notice was headed SYSTEM DISTURBANCE (DEMERARA & BERBICE), and it told customers that "approximately 10% of affected customers have been repowered". GPL said restoration was continuing progressively. The company apologised for the inconvenience and thanked customers for their patience.
Inside two and a half hours the post drew 137 comment and reply records, which this newspaper captured. It is not a scatter of complaints. It is a running, geographically specific contradiction of the company's own figure, written by the people the figure was about.
Which areas were still without power after GPL said ten per cent were repowered?
At least thirty separate commenters asked a version of the same question: which ten per cent? Ramena Ramsundar asked in four words whether the ten per cent was the farms. Andella Moses asked to be counted in it, "asking for a friend". Nicky Terry Singh said that after reading the thread it seemed everybody still had blackout.
Then came the places. On the Essequibo bank and the west coast, readers named Parika, Tuschen, Zeelugt and Vergenoegen. On the West Bank Demerara, Nismes, Goed Fortuin and Vreed-en-Hoop. On the East Bank, Providence, Prospect, Perseverance and Covent Garden. In Georgetown, Sophia, Kitty, Campbellville and Laing Avenue. On the East Coast, Buxton, Enmore, Melanie and Non Pariel. In Berbice, Bush Lot and Port Mourant. Collet Baird was blunt about it: "Parika definitely not in that 10%." Four readers reported Sophia dark, two of them noting that Sophia had not appeared on any advance list.
That is at least twenty named communities, from Essequibo to Berbice, contradicting a claim of partial restoration issued by the utility that serves them. The notice did not say which areas the ten per cent covered.
Several readers described power returning and failing again inside minutes. Shakima Jasmin recorded being "Repowered for 1 minute… blackout again". Adriel Austin said the supply in Nismes went on and off "like is fairy lights". Tiance Daniels-Johnson said it was the third failure of that day.
The euphemism drew its own objection. Deonath Sooklall called system disturbance "another fancy word for blackouts". Damien Sooklall asked what a system disturbance is, and the question drew agreement.
What did the outage cost households and small businesses?
Losses of a kind that never reach a utility's reliability statistics run through the thread.
Mohini Ramoutar, in Port Mourant, was holding goods for other people: "I have people parcel in my fridge. Who paying for the people stuff?" Jessica Marques Crandon made the point that in much of Guyana the two utilities fail together, "when light gone water gone too", which turns a power cut into a water cut on a Saturday set aside for washing and cooking. Five commenters posted under business names, among them a printery, a laundry, two retail traders and a production outfit. A sixth wrote about his barber shop. The cost of an unscheduled outage does not stop at households.
Nicolas Stephney asked for the one thing the notice withheld. He accepted that crews were working. He wanted the nature of the fault and an estimated restoration time, so that people could make arrangements, because "electricity is something we depend on and it is not a luxury item".
Heat sharpened all of it. The Hydrometeorological Service of Guyana warned in August that the country faced a hotter, drier period lasting from August to at least October, with around eighty hot-spell days against a historical norm of roughly thirty, naming Regions Four, Five, Six, Eight and Ten as most exposed. Regions Four, Five and Six carry the Demerara and Berbice load that failed on Saturday. Annastaceya Dhaniram drew the obvious conclusion that GPL should not expect anyone "to exhibit patience through El Nino".
Why did the timing of the outage matter for religious observance?
Saturday 12 September was not an ordinary Saturday. It was the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and this year the first day fell on Shabbat.
That combination matters because two sets of restrictions apply at once. Observant practice treats the operation of an electrical switch as prohibited on Shabbat. Appliances switched on before the day begins may keep running, provided nobody adjusts them, and pre-set timers are permitted. Cooking, which a festival day allows, is not allowed when that festival day is also Shabbat.
Read those rules against a blackout and the difficulty becomes plain. Observance does not merely discourage the acts that recovery requires. It forbids them. On the same reasoning that prohibits operating a switch, resetting a tripped breaker would fall inside the prohibition. A warming plate left on from before sundown may run, though the sources consulted say nothing about what happens when the supply to it fails, and restarting it would itself be an act of switching. So the acts that restore a household to working order are the acts the day restricts. The established exception is danger to life, which overrides the restrictions, including in cases of doubt. Inconvenience does not.
There is a second problem, and it belongs to GPL rather than to anyone's religion. The company posted its update on Facebook. This newspaper found no report of the outage from any other outlet on the day, and could not access the Stabroek News or News Room archives for 12 September. On the evidence available, GPL's Facebook page appears to have been the only channel carrying restoration information. It is a channel a Sabbath observer cannot open. Anyone observing the day was therefore both least able to act on an update and least able to receive one. Georgetown had gone dark five days after GPL said it had enough power.
How many people this describes in Guyana is beside the point, and we reject the question rather than answer it. A utility's duty to keep the lights on, and to say plainly when they will come back, does not scale with the size of the group inconvenienced when it fails. Nobody proposes that a hospital circuit matters in proportion to its bed count. The measure of a service is what its failure does to the customer least able to work around it, and on Saturday that customer was anyone who had arranged a household around a day on which the arrangements cannot be touched. One such household is enough.
Observance of a Saturday is in any event present in Guyana and not confined to one faith. Chabad reported in August 2025 that its roving rabbis had found Jewish expatriates working in diplomacy, oil and agriculture, and that a Georgetown Shabbat dinner drew close to fifteen people; a rabbi based in St Lucia visits ahead of the major holidays. Seventh-day Adventists also keep Saturday, and the Guyana Conference of Seventh-day Adventists counted 178 churches in the country as of June 2025.
No Guyanese religious body appears to have publicly raised power outages as a worship issue, in any year, and this newspaper does not report that any has. The observation here is our own.
Does GPL plan its supply around the calendar?
It does, for one set of dates. In December 2025 chief executive Kesh Nandlall assured the public of reliable supply through the Christmas holidays, projecting a seasonal peak of 210 to 250 megawatts and stating that roughly 250 megawatts would be reliably available.
The utility has made that kind of public commitment for Christmas. This newspaper found none for Diwali, Eid, Phagwah, or for Saturday worship.
That gap sits on top of a documented capacity margin with little room. GPL told the Guyana Chronicle on 8 September that generation was adequate and that distribution was the constraint, with deputy chief executive Bharat Harjohn describing feeders and transformers "buckling under record evening loads" between seven and nine in the evening. Available generation stood at 265.6 megawatts, rising to 270 by 11 September. Peak demand was running at 250 to 257 megawatts, with 257 recorded on 1 September against 221 a year earlier. The company traced recent shutdowns to critical faults at the Kingston substation, and noted that roughly a third of system power moves through the Kingston to Vreed-en-Hoop corridor.
A margin of roughly nine to twenty megawatts, on a distribution network that Demerara Waves reported GPL itself describing as failing, is the context for the ten per cent claim. GPL has also located the cause in its customers, telling Kaieteur News on 8 September that heavy use of air conditioning, fans and lights was driving the outages. A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) said on 12 September that the company was shifting blame to consumers. As this newspaper reported, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) Guyana found GPL met two and a half of eight performance targets for 2025.
What is GPL building while the grid keeps failing?
The day before the grid failed, GPL set out what it is building to prevent this. Ignite News reported on 11 September that a new national control centre at Good Hope will let operators pinpoint faults, so that "the affected section could be isolated while electricity is rerouted". Kesh Nandlall put the Good Hope substation at about US$46 million and transmission contracts at US$422.2 million, with a functional smart grid targeted for 2030. Phase one covers generation, transmission and substations. Phase two reaches feeders, transformers and customer meters.
Phase two is the part that matters here. Feeders and transformers are exactly where GPL says this month's failures are happening. The capability to isolate a fault and tell customers which of them still have power is therefore scheduled, not available, and the target year is 2030.
Twenty-four hours after that announcement, the company could not tell its customers which ten per cent of them had been repowered.
On 12 September, the same day the system went down, the Guyana Chronicle carried GPL's account of a major network expansion: 155 kilometres of 230 kilovolt line, 167 kilometres at 69 kilovolts, and new substations at Goedverwagting, Williamsburg, Enmore, Chateau Margot and Columbia. Minister Deodat Indar said in August that blackouts would continue until the lines and substations were fixed.
Both things are true. The build is real, and the grid failed on a Saturday in the middle of it.
What remains unexplained is the number. GPL published a restoration figure of approximately ten per cent and did not say which ten per cent. More than thirty of its own customers, naming their own villages, put that figure in doubt on the company's own page. The comment that drew the most agreement in the thread, from Safraz Baksh, guessed at who the fortunate tenth might be: "It could even be the 1% up the highway side." Brandon Rajkumar needed three words: "Fastest growing economy."
Frequently Asked Questions
What did GPL say about the 12 September 2026 system disturbance?
GPL said approximately 10% of affected customers had been repowered across Demerara and Berbice, that restoration was continuing progressively, and it apologised. The notice did not say which areas the ten per cent covered.
Which areas were still without power after GPL's ten per cent claim?
Commenters on GPL's own notice named at least twenty communities still dark, from Parika and Tuschen in the west to Port Mourant in Berbice. Four separate commenters reported Sophia, which had not appeared on any advance list.
Why did the timing of the outage matter for religious observance?
Saturday 12 September 2026 was the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and that day fell on Shabbat, so two sets of restrictions applied. Observant practice prohibits operating an electrical switch. Seventh-day Adventists also keep Saturday.
What has GPL said is causing the 2026 outages?
GPL told the Guyana Chronicle on 8 September 2026 that generation was adequate and distribution was the constraint. It told Kaieteur News that customer air conditioning, fans and lights drove the outages. APNU said GPL was shifting blame.
How much spare generating capacity does GPL have?
Available generation stood at 265.6 megawatts on 8 September 2026, rising to 270 by 11 September, against peak demand of 250 to 257 megawatts. That leaves a margin of roughly nine to twenty megawatts.