Electricity upgrades promised with new budget

By Ryan Haas
Reporter-SKNVibes.com

Dr. Hon. Earl Asim Martin explains the extent of the damage at the Needsmust Power Station to the Prime Minister, Dr. Hon. Denzil Douglas

“I want to say that the budget as [Dr. Hon. Timothy Harris] outlined provides the opportunities for improvement, though we are experiencing difficulties at this particular moment,” Martin said.

With a 2009 allocation of $99.8 million, a nearly $11 million increase over 2008, Martin said that his ministry would be able to address many of the issues that plagued the Electricity Department this year.

“I want to say that the last couple of months within the ministry have been quite challenging, but life is about challenges,” he stated. “We have had problems in terms of outages. We have had problems most recently in terms of a fire.”

Detailing the difficulties customers had gone through when the Needsmust Power Station was plunged ten megawatts below its necessary capacity to supply power to the island, Martin said he “too share[s] the general public’s concerns when they have outages”.

He said that the new budget would allow his ministry to address short term infrastructural upgrades that would ensure the stability of the system. ~~Adz:Right~~

“One of the things we are implementing at this present time at the power station is to put in a protection system. You would recall a couple of years ago, that whenever there was a problem out in the field it would come back to the generators at the plant and shut down the whole system.

“We are now putting in place a protection system…that is almost 60% completed. The protection is now on the generation plant and they will not have to close it down if there is a problem on the outside. They might close a particular feeder where that problem is on, but closing down the whole plant would have come to an end about a month ago,” Martin said.

Additionally, he said that the ministry will be upgrading its overhead lines and researching alternative energies in the new year as a way to provide better service to its customers. The proposal to make the Electricity Department a private entity was also proffered by the Minister.

“We started almost eighteen months ago in terms of the corporatisation of the whole Electricity Department. We want to move it from being an entity of government and make it a corporatised entity. I am going to continue that process.”

While Martin said that financing had always been a problem in upgrading the Electricity Department, he promised that in 2009 he would continue to “find innovative ways of doing things” in spite of financial constraints.