Recent blackouts unconnected to conserving of fuel
Kingston plant shuts down today
By Gitanjali Singh
Stabroek News
February 21, 2003
Frequent blackouts have returned, especially for consumers on the 60-cycle system but John Lynn, Chief Executive Officer of GPL says the outages are unplanned and not yet related to lower fuel supplies.
The situation can only get worse with the Kingston steam generator being taken out of operation from tonight to conserve on fuel consumption.
Lynn said no fuel-related outages had taken place to date and if it became necessary to have such outages, GPL would advise its customers before if possible, or immediately afterwards.
Hundreds of consumers powered through the Demerara interconnected system were without power for close to five hours yesterday morning when the distribution system went down.
Lynn said a problem developed in the 50Hz and 60Hz transmission/distribution network, which caused the generators to trip yesterday morning. He said when the engineers attempted to get the generators going they had some difficulties and as a result some consumers were without power for varying periods in the morning.
Consumers from the East Coast, East Bank and West Coast of Demerara yesterday complained of being without power for several hours. Additionally, consumers say that they have been having more blackouts in recent times.
With the Kingston buffer plant taken out, the situation would worsen because of the structure of the distribution network. The old Georgetown system is run on 4, 11 and 13.8 KV distribution networks which are susceptible to leakage and disruptions. Additionally, reports say if there is a major breakdown in one of the generation systems and an attempt is made to restart Kingston, this would take 72 hours because of the need to generate steam for the plant.
Lynn had indicated that Kingston would be taken out to conserve on fuel as the company was in a financial bind since it has not been able to collect higher rates for this year. The rate increases were blocked by a court order and the company twice in recent weeks had short-ordered on fuel.
Lynn had said if a fault were to occur in the generation system after Friday, which could not be quickly fixed, Kingston would be brought back on stream.
Kingston produces 50-cycle power and is not an efficient producer, generating only 7 MW out of a total installed capacity of 113 MW. However this was considered a cushion in the system allowing for a smooth flow of current to consumers.
Additionally, the Kingston Power Plant was supposed to have been decommissioned.
Asked about the recent blackouts, Lynn said faults occurred on the network from time to time in an unpredictable way. He said the extent of disruption depended on where the problem arose and certain types of problems on the network could interfere with generation. “There is no way to predict such occurrences.”
He dismissed the notion that the power outages were part of GPL’s strategy to get their rate increases or to put pressure on the government currently negotiating changes with its GPL shareholding partner, AC Power, to restructure the power company.
The GPL licence has set targets on the frequency and duration of power outages.
