How Karpowership Made a Guyana Riverbank Ready for Power

Sixteen Days From Mooring to Full Power

On May 1, 2024, a Karpowership vessel arrived in Georgetown, Guyana. Three days later it sailed up the Berbice River to a jetty at Everton, on the river's east bank. On May 20, sixteen days after mooring there and with the connection work complete, it was delivering its full 36 megawatts to the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System.

A Riverbank, Not a Port

Everton is not a purpose-built port. No deepwater terminal and no dredged approach channel existed there before the vessel arrived. Guyana Power and Light chose the site for its place on the grid: capacity connected on the Berbice side strengthens that stretch of the interconnected system. The site had to work as it was, and it did.

What Deepwater Access Costs, By Comparison

Elsewhere in the country, Guyana has been paying to dredge roughly nine kilometres of channel, at a cost of 11.2 million US dollars, to give larger vessels access to a different site. That figure is a useful yardstick. It is what building deepwater access for a generation asset can cost, in money and in time, when the ground itself has to be reshaped first. Everton needed none of it. A shallow-draft powership, built to operate from a modest berth rather than a dredged terminal, turned an ordinary riverbank into a generation site within weeks.

Two Vessels, 96 Megawatts

The Everton unit now works alongside a second Karpowership vessel moored at Meadow Bank on the Demerara River, delivering 60 megawatts, for a combined 96 megawatts feeding Guyana's national grid. In July 2026, the two sides agreed a new two-year contract for the Berbice vessel, with Guyana's Public Utilities Minister Deodat Indar explaining the choice of location in the plainest possible terms: "there's a reason why we put the 36 megawatts in Berbice. We put it there so that you can bring up the voltage level on that side."

Site Preparation as the Real Advantage

Guyana is still dredging channels to build the deepwater access its longer-term energy plans will need. What Everton showed is that the slowest part of bringing power to a new place, preparing the site, can be done in weeks when the plant arrives ready to run and the berth only has to be adapted, not built. Any riverbank with the right grid connection is, in principle, a site. As Guyana works toward its Wales gas-to-energy project and the deeper water access that future growth will require, that is a kind of site the country now knows it can bring into service in weeks, not years.