The Guyana Power and Light (GPL) said power has been restored to areas that had been affected by an outage that started from Saturday morning and continued until Sunday evening in some areas.
In a press release, GPL said that on Saturday, around 12.32 am, transmission lines linking Garden of Eden and Sophia tripped during adverse weather resulting in a total shutdown of the Demerara Interconnected System. “While circuits were being restored just after 01:00 hrs, there was a second shutdown due to system instability,” it added. Consequently power to consumers in central Georgetown was not restored until 2 am and the last circuit re-powered by 4.51 am.
GPL said the combination of incidents and mechanical problems caused 25MW of Wartsila capacity comprising four engines to be unavailable throughout Saturday. However, by evening, one of the four Wartsila machines was restored increasing the Demerara availability to 63MW resulting in peak period load shedding to consumers in Newtown, Queenstown and Alberttown.
Further, GPL said, on Sunday, while every effort was made to maintain a stable power supply, the heavy rain and high winds which started in the early hours of the day caused severe network disruptions resulting in unscheduled outages from 5.50 am to 10.54 am to the Tucville well, the Sophia well, South Ruimveldt, Festival City, North, East and West Ruimveldt, Roxanne Burnham Gardens, Guy Hoc Park, Ebenezer Drive and Success.
By Sunday evening, the three Wartsila units that were unavailable since Saturday morning were restored to service.
Checks on the feeder serving consumers from Sophia to Success identified a large tree in contact with the circuit in Oleander Gardens. Since the area was flooded and technicians could not gain access to the tree, consumers between Industry and a section of Better Hope were without power until yesterday morning when they were able to remove it at 11.02 am. Meanwhile, power was rerouted from Success to Better Hope after the evening peak.
GPL urges the public to report all instances of power outages that may occur due to rain or high winds as the company may not always be aware of them.
