BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – EMERGENCY maintenance was the source of three unscheduled power interruptions in the St. Peter’s area over the past week, according to a press release by the St. Kitts Electricity Department.
Residents of that community were first made to go without power last Monday (Feb. 15), as the Bayfords feeders were opened from 7:15 to 10:52 a.m. They were again the victims of a morning outage just three days later (Feb. 18), when their electricity supply was interrupted for over 90 minutes.
Another unscheduled disruption occurred on Sunday (Feb. 21) from 11:35 a.m. to 12:25 p.m.
The communiqué, issued yesterday (Feb. 22), explained that these incidents were due to emergency maintenance work, and not because of any irregularities in the engine’s system. It also stated that the department was “deeply regretful” of any inconvenience that the interruptions had caused.
“All outages were in fact triggered by the power station as a preventative measure of reducing the strain on the other engines as emergency maintenance was carried out on the KV 12 #2 engine that had developed a problem on the cooling system,” read the release. “The engine remains in service as the issue was resolved by the maintenance staff of the department.”
An already unreliable electricity supply was exacerbated by an early morning fire at the Needsmust Power Station on October 2, 2008, which resulted in the loss of the plant’s two largest engines and has caused electricity officials to institute load-shedding at various times since then.
In December of that year, the government began renting generators from Aggreko International Projects Ltd. at a reported annual cost of EC$11M. They subsequently purchased a MAN Diesel Ltd. Holeby generator in September 2009, bringing the number of government-owned generators to nine.
SKNVibes contacted Power Station Operations Manager C. Jomo Williams, who confirmed that both the Aggreko and MAN engines were still in operation, but said he could not give a price tag for the continued rental from the Aggreko company.
He explained that the plant was still in the process of expanding its power generation system and until it was completed, consumers would have to handle the occasional supply disruption.
“Every week, the Electricity Department publishes a list outlining the communities and times that outages will occur due to scheduled maintenance. Persons should be guided by that list and use it as a plan on those days their area will be affected,” Williams said, adding that the electricity supply had improved “in every area” as a result of the upgrade.
“We are trying to gradually phase out the Aggreko generators, but we still need the additional capacity that only more generators can bring. I expect that problem to be rectified by next year.”
