Dr. Karen Abrams writes a weekly column on technology, education, and economics. She is the founder of STEMGuyana.
Listen closely in any commercial district in Guyana and you will hear it. The hum. The generator behind the supermarket, beside the restaurant, on the roof of the bank. We have grown so accustomed to it that we no longer hear it at all. But that hum is the sound of money burning, and I want to talk about how much.
The last time Guyana received an objective external score on electricity, the World Bank’s Doing Business 2020 report gave us a reliability of supply index of zero out of eight. Not three. Not two. Zero. Getting a new connection took an average of 82 days and eight separate procedures, ranking us 170th of 190 economies on access to power. That assessment is six years old now, and the country has changed enormously since. But every business owner reading this knows the underlying problem has not disappeared, because they are still paying for it every month.
Here is what unreliable power actually costs. Every generator a business buys is a private tax paid to replace a public failure. The machine itself, the fuel, the maintenance, the space it occupies. Then add the spoiled inventory when the power cuts and the backup fails. The equipment damaged by surges. The staff hours lost. The customers who walked out. The orders that could not be processed. International research consistently finds that unreliable electricity costs businesses in developing economies several percent of annual sales. In a country where firms already face high freight costs and long customs delays, power is one more weight on the same scale.
But there is a deeper cost that connects directly to what I have been writing about in recent weeks, and it is the one almost nobody discusses. Unreliable power is a barrier to competition. Think about who can afford to self-generate. The large established firm with capital can buy industrial generators and absorb the fuel bill. The young entrepreneur starting a bakery, a small manufacturing operation, a cold storage business, or a technology firm cannot. So unreliable power does not punish all businesses equally. It punishes new and small businesses most, and in doing so it quietly protects incumbents from exactly the competitive pressure our concentrated market already lacks. A country that wants more competition, more new firms, and more innovation needs reliable public power as a precondition, not a luxury.
This is why I have come to see the Gas-to-Energy project as something more than an infrastructure investment. If it delivers what it promises, cheaper and more reliable power at scale, it will be the single most important competition policy intervention in modern Guyanese history. It will lower the cost floor for every business in the country at once. It will remove the private generation tax that falls hardest on the smallest firms. It will make whole categories of business viable that are currently impossible, from food processing to data services. And it will do more for the cost of living than most direct interventions could, because energy costs sit inside the price of nearly everything we buy.
So here is the standard I believe we should all hold, regardless of how we feel about any other public question. Judge the project by the number. The reliability of supply index was zero out of eight. The cost of power for a small business was among the highest in the hemisphere. When the project is complete, those numbers should move, visibly and measurably, in the lives of ordinary business owners. Cheaper power on the bill. Fewer outages in the month. Generators that gather dust. That is what success looks like, and it is entirely fair for citizens to track it.
The hum behind the supermarket has been the background music of Guyanese commerce for two generations. The opportunity in front of us is to turn it off, not building by building, but nationally. Few things would do more for the wallet of every consumer and the prospects of every entrepreneur. We should want this to succeed, we should say so, and we should measure it honestly when it arrives.