29 Jul 2002

Hopes that power supply soon back to normal in Honiara

4:12 pm on 29 July 2002

The Solomon Islands Electricity Authority is calling on its business customers to pay their accounts early to avoid future shutdowns.

The SIEA, a government-owned entity, has been struggling to pay for diesel, and the capital Honiara has endured a series of power shutdowns, the latest, all day yesterday.

The Government last week agreed to a tariff increase or around 20 percent and general manager, Mike Nation, says he's hopeful this will solve the problems.

He says they have already billed customers for the higher rate.

"it will be probably another three to four weeks before we see the full impact of this increase in the tariff, in the meantime we are approaching many of the larger companies in town to make pre payments on their electricity accounts such that we can then have sufficient fuel to pay the local fuel company here and hopefully we won't have to load share like we did over the weekend"

Mike Nation.