The many unscheduled power outages which have affected GPL customers since Saturday have been caused by the recently damaged transmission and distribution lines, the company says.
In a press release issued yesterday, the Guyana Power & Light (GPL) said that heavy rains and winds between Friday night and Saturday morning caused “a number of transmission and distributions lines to develop faults”. This resulted in “two total system shutdowns in the Demerara Interconnected System early Saturday morning,” the release said.
Further, both of the company’s frequency converters at Sophia developed electrical problems early Saturday morning which resulted in a number of customers experiencing outages, because of limited generation capacity at the required frequency, the release said. According to the power company, by Saturday afternoon one of the converters was repaired and put back into service, while the other was not operational until yesterday afternoon.
“Although power has been restored to the whole of Demerara, the rising demand depleted the small available generation margin and consequently any continued increase in demand may result in outages during peak hours,” the release said.
The power company is urging all customers “to conserve as much energy as possible and to report any faults/outages” to the company’s Emergency Call Centre on 225-4015 or 225-4016.
