With four separate problems sparking a wave of blackouts across the city and other areas over the last week, the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) yesterday said it was doing all it could to prevent a recurrence during the upcoming holidays.
Breaking its silence on the blackouts at a press conference yesterday at GPL’s boardroom on Duke Street, Kingston, Deputy CEO Technical Elwyn Marshall said that there was nothing the company could have done to prevent the blackouts which riled up the public. “If there is something we could’ve done we would’ve done it,” he said.
Marshall said that just before the Christmas season the power company intensifies its maintenance programme to ensure that the network was in a condition where faults could be prevented. “I’m not here to say that we could be 100% and this has showed up in some of the incidents but to say that I can guarantee that it won’t happen before the end of the year, I wouldn’t put my head on a block. What I am saying is we are continuing to do as much as possible to prevent a recurrence,” Marshall said.
GPL’s supply situation is also tight. Excluding Skeldon, it currently has a capacity of 104 MW and the expected demand is 108 to 109 MW.
Explaining the recent spate of blackouts, Marshall said that last Tuesday around 8.30 pm one of the conductor feeders coming out of the Kingston Power Station “burnt off and fell across another line that was being fed out to Sophia. As a result, the line linking the Kingston and Sophia Substation tripped which led to a total outage of the system.” Marshall said this took some three hours to restore to normalcy, which is slightly longer than it normally takes for similar problems.
On Friday, he said, a failed insulator on the feeder that supplies Alberttown, Queenstown, Thomas Lands and the surrounding areas caused a cross arm to fail and burst into flames. As a result the conductor ended up “shorting out” and got into contact with a second contactor. “…So we had to shut down and so the F8 feeder was out which meant that the large portions of Alberttown, Queenstown, Thomas Lands and the hospital [GPHC] were out of power. What we managed to do was to provide an alternative feed from another feeder so that the hospital and other areas resumed power,” he pointed out.
Marshall said that while there are three feeders coming out of the Kingston Plant supplying the commercial district, on Saturday two of the feeders became entangled. One of the feeders encountered a burnt jumper and burnt switch “and what seemed to have happened is there was a fault under a circuit and because of the heavy burn it sank and came into contact with another.” He said it took a while to sort out the problem which meant that the F8 feeder was out for a while. He pointed out that they had to take out the F3 feeder and the fact that they are all located together meant that they couldn’t do repair works on one without disabling the others. “So the entire area would’ve been out of power for a while,” he said.
With reference to the most recent outage, early Sunday morning, Marshall pointed out that the power transformer at Kingston, which converts power that comes from the generators, tripped and as a result there was a blackout to all the areas it serves. “We started (rebooting) the system and around 4 [am] while in the process of bringing back the system a cubicle from the Kingston One Power Plant, which has the switch gear for two generators, suffered from an insulation failure,” he said, while stating that the combined issues resulted in them having to take the generator out of service. However, they were able to fix the cubicle and get the generators back into service.
When questioned as to whether there was a single reason for all the issues, Marshall said that there were four separate incidents and had nothing to do with bad weather.
Acting CEO Renford Homer also said, “On last Tuesday the problem started in Stone Avenue, Campbellville and that pretty much resulted in total outage. The other subsequently on Saturday was at Kingston just outside the generating station and unfortunately that led into the issue at the station and saw one of the engines basically being forced offline because of (an) insulation issue.”
Marshall also added that in the case of insulator failures the company has not adopted a system of replacing all of them. While some utilities may do it, he said, “We have not adopted that principle. We would do what we call a night inspection to try to establish whether the insulator is going or if there is a problem. We had not picked up that this particular one was going but we picked up quite a few defective ones and we changed them.” He added that the chances of something of the sort happening again was minimized by the work they had put in over the last few nights and they were hoping it didn’t happen again.
Last month, GPL notified of a series of scheduled blackouts to facilitate line maintenance which was supposed to ensure stable supply in a high-use month like December.
In a statement on November 7, GPL said on November 6 it effectively completed maintenance on the 69 kv transmission line and structures carrying 11 kV and 13.8 kV lines along the corridor linking the Kingston Power Stations to the Sophia Substation, at 20:00hrs.
Despite this work, shutdowns and blackouts continued after November 7. The shutdowns on Saturday and Sunday were more severe, raising ongoing questions about the management of GPL which has been without a Chief Executive Officer for months.
In October this year, Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo enquired from Minister of Public Infrastructure David Patterson about the causes of numerous power outages. “We did ask GPL to provide us with a report on what was happening in relation to these blackouts,” Minister of State Joseph Harmon had told a post-Cabinet press conference.
Harmon informed that GPL provided government with reports on the Demerara-Berbice Interconnected System and stated that there was also “a tripping” in the line between Kingston and Sophia.
He said the power company had given the assurance that it was making all efforts to continuously test the lines and correct faults.
“They have given the assurance that the blackouts were for a short period and there is [no] likelihood of blackouts again in that way,” Harmon had said.
On Sunday, Private Sector Commission Head Eddie Boyer lambasted GPL over the blackouts and for not communicating with the public on Saturday and Sunday over the causes of the outages.
