Belize Looks to World Bank to Expand Belize’s Energy Capacity
For the first time, a regional vice president of the World Bank has visited Belize. Over the past week, World Bank Vice President for Latin America and the Caribbean Region, Carlos Felipe Jaramillo has been here. He told the Government’s Press Office today that the World Bank wants to deepen its relationship with the Government of Belize, and support us in a number of areas where the bank believes it can be useful. Jaramillo said that the World Bank wants to help countries that aim to eliminate poverty and improve their development. And Minister of State in Finance, Chris Coye explained today that Belize is looking to increase our energy capacity significantly.
Carlos Felipe Jaramillo
Carlos Felipe Jaramillo, V.P., Latin America
“We’ve been making inroads in this partnership, and right now we have engagement in health, which arose out of the pandemic. We have now support in agriculture. And yesterday I was able to visit these agricultural these farmers and then trying to see how we can help them more with better technology and more investments. And we have engagements also in helping the government with their fiscal management and debt management. We have done a public expenditure review with special focus on areas of education and health where you know, we hope that we can continue to be useful, and maybe very importantly is the blue economy. And we have a project that we are designing that we hope will come to maturity early next year, which is about blue cities and how to help Belize continue to consolidate this blue economy.”
Chris Coye
Chris Coye, Minister of State, Finance
“Now, what we’re looking at not only the blue cities program, but also the energy battery energy storage. I think it’s no secret the challenges in the energy sector that Belize has, partly of our own doing, in that we have grown far faster than was projected. And so we are meeting peak demands that are impacted by the supply or the constraints of supply that we have locally and from Mexico. So it’s important for us to move very quickly in terms of improving the energy available for our local demands. The battery energy storage project that we’re looking at should attract or should bring between 40 and 50 megawatts capacity.”
