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Power protection failure causing Berbice blackouts – GPL
The Guyana Power & Light Inc (GPL) Berbice generation capacity has been affected since the new year began. Berbicians have entered 2013 with rolling blackouts almost on a daily basis. The power company’s Area Manager, Ayube Bacchus, has stated that the reason for the frequent outages is that the schematic protective mechanism on the 5-Megawatt Number Four Mirlees Blackstone Unit at the Canefield Power Station has been damaged.
GPL Berbice Manager, Ayube Bacchus
“It’s a technical problem that lies within a couple of our engine protections. It could be over-speed or a number of reasons behind those protections,” he explained.
“Those protections are there for safety, and the fact that we are so cautious about it is because that’s our safety net and we don’t want to compromise the safety of the engine, so we need to approach this with maximum precaution, and that takes time, because we want to ensure that the engine protections are functioning properly.”
The aggravating outages last from one to four hours, two to three times daily.
“We have narrowed the problem down to Canefield and we have been collecting data from that generating facility and analyzing those data to come up with appropriate action plans, whereby we can resolve the technical difficulties that we have been faced with.
We are at a position now where the problem has been identified. It’s a question of time…when to take the unit out and to address it. We have to maintain generation and the window for doing this corrective work is very limited.”
Bacchus stated that the other main generating set at the station, the Number 3 Mirlees Engine is currently being overhauled.
“This is on major overhaul and is not due back until the end of February. This generator provides another 5 megawatts to the Berbice Interconnected System. The unit is usually taken out of operation after 12,000 hours of operation, opened and inspected. As a result, the Number Four Unit along with a few Caterpillar sets at Canefield, have to feed the brunt of electricity from that station to the grid. We rely on Onverwagt Power Station as a voltage stability station and they have one base-load engine there which we are depending on.”
“GPL is sincerely apologizing for the inconvenience and frustration that our customers are facing, but I assure them that we are making every possible effort to correct the situation. Our staff is working numerous hours to fix this and we are on very high alert to monitor our units during this period.”
Currently in the system, 24 megawatts are available, with a peak demand of 18 megawatts and 14 during the daytime.
Bacchus blamed the highest number of blackouts in 2012—247—on the increased maintenance schedules within the system.
“We also did a lot of engine maintenance and the 247 is a combination of planned work in those outages and some of it also was due to unscheduled maintenance that affected the system—but yes, the 247 is high, but we are working to address that and hope to cut that back down this year significantly, even though we started the year badly, we can still pull it back and minimize as best as we can.”
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