Dear Editor,
GPL had another total system shutdown last Saturday night which makes it a total of five shutdowns in the first five months of 2022. According to the Stabroek News article of May 30, 2022, “A statement from the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) said that the fault activated the protection system, which resulted in the feeders going offline. This sudden and significant loss of generation resulted in the generators going offline”.
This mediocre explanation by GPL, for an outage with occurred late at night when the load was low and there was adequate generation capacity, clearly shows that GPL has no clue what caused the system to shut down. If the feeders went offline, there would be a loss of load not a loss of generation! This would mean that there was an excess of power being generated relative to the load and this would result in an over frequency situation which would have resulted in the generators tripping.
I have advised on numerous occasions that GPL needs to have Wartsila interconnect and programme the Wartsila Unified Controls (UNIC) System on the three Wartsila Power Plants, at Kingston, Vreed-en-Hoop, and Garden of Eden (GOE), so that they would automatically reduce generation whenever feeders’ trip and there is a large loss of load in the system. If GPL continues to run the engines in Speed Droop and Fixed Kilowatt mode, we will continue to have these total shutdowns.
The power generation situation in Guyana should have been significantly improved with the commissioning of the new 46.5 MW Wartsila plant at Garden of Eden. However, that plant has been responsible for most of the power outages in 2022 even though it is still under warranty and is being operated and maintained by the Original Equipment Manufacture (OEM) Wartsila. One must wonder why GPL has not made a warranty claim and penalised Wartsila as per the O&M contract for all down time caused by the shutdowns of the GOE Plant?
Yours truly,
Tara Singh
