While the weather is getting hotter, Belco is asking for Bermudians to avoid their air conditioners and conserve energy to prevent outages.

Until July 28, Belco will be working on several of its engines while the process of commissioning its three new gas turbine engines continues.

While Belco said the plant will still produce enough energy to power the Island, if any engines are forced to be shut down, there will be controlled outages around the Island.

Two such outages have already taken place this week, with 7,000 customers losing power for an hour last Friday morning and 2,500 customers losing power for 15 minutes on Tuesday afternoon.

Both outages affected the East and Central parishes. The East End was selected because a cable fault caused a prolonged blackout in the West End late last month.

To help reduce the number of outages while work is being done, Belco is asking Bermudians to conserve power when possible.

Senior Vice President of Operations at Belco Robert Steynor said: "We are asking people to conserve energy especially through this period of planned, essential maintenance work that cannot be delayed because we do not have sufficient redundancy in our plant capacity.

"Normally, we would have gas turbine units standing by for emergency operation, but one of our large gas turbines is forced out of service and our new units are not yet ready to be put into regular service.

'At the same time, our diesel engines are ageing, with one having been forced into retirement last year."