The Guyana Power and Light’s (GPL) 46.5-megawatt (MW) plant at Garden of Eden should begin exporting electricity to the national grid by the end of September with the final testing phases having already commenced.
Prime Minister Mark Phillips and Bharat Dindyal, Chief Exe-cutive Officer (CEO) of GPL, along with directors, yesterday participated in the soft commissioning of the five generators that will be the core of the plant’s operations at Garden of Eden on the East Bank of Demerara.
Commissioning should last for about another month.
While at the plant, Phillips switched on each generator and allowed it to run for five minutes before shutting it down. Afterwards, he stated that he was pleased that the process went smoothly and was satisfied that the generators were in working order. He noted that it won’t be long before Guyanese can benefit from the 46.5 megawatts of additional electricity.
However, he cautioned that there is still a lot of work to be done including the linking of the power plant to the sub-station and the ongoing maintenance of the transmission and distribution system.
According to Dindyal, for the next few weeks they will be commissioning individual systems in the plant and conducting load testing of the engines. Each engine is capable of producing 9.3 megawatts of power. The sub-station also has to be commissioned and this should be done later this month. He added that each engine will be loaded individually and once on, will run for five consecutive days. During this process, he noted, they will be observing the efficiency of the plant, the consumption rate, and several other important parameters.
Following these steps, he said, the plant can begin sending power to the national grid. “We hope that all this will be completed in the month of September, and like I said, when we finish the commissioning, we go straight into commercial operations.”
The CEO pointed out that the plant has been under construction for a number of months and has faced delays due to the global COVID-19 pandemic and other factors. However, despite the setbacks, the final commissioning stages have been reached which will lead toward commercial operations.
He added that the operations and maintenance contractors – Wärtsilä –are already on site and will be running the plant. He explained that about three dozen persons will be operating the plant with about two complete shifts already on location. The plant manager designate, as well as the operations and maintenance supervisor, he noted, are also already in the country and once the commissioning stages are completed, all relevant personnel should be on site.
Wärtsilä will be providing training to all operators and will continue to provide support to the plant as the contract has a one-year warranty clause. “We will continue to receive support from the project people should anything go wrong.”
Dindyal went on to disclose that GPL and Wärtsilä are currently negotiating the operations and maintenance agreement and that their current presence in Guyana is a result of the mobilisation agreement.
Back in November, the power company had received the five generators from Finland. The five Wärtsilä generators can each produce 9.3 megawatts of power and were recently installed on site. The project cost is pegged at US$52 million.
In October last year, Phillips was given a tour of the Garden of Eden facility. Ryon Ross, Divi-sional Director of Engineering Services had explained then that the power plant will be a dual-fuel power generator. He pointed out that with the expectation of Guyana tapping into natural gas from offshore petroleum
operations, the power plant is built to work with both heavy fuel oil and natural gas.
The old power generating plant had been costing GPL a large sum of money to maintain and Ross noted that with the generators being old, they were no longer efficient and finding spare parts at times proved to be difficult. The power plant was constructed in the 1970s and its engines are over 26 years old.
However, Ross had said that GPL does not plan on abandoning the old power plant because when the new one comes on stream as they will need all the electricity available to supply the national grid.
