GPL, there are still people around who can understand electricity

Jun 16, 2024 Letters

Dear Editor,

I grew up in New Amsterdam in the 1950s, where there were hundreds of vultures, which we called carrion crows. Some used to come home to roost in coconut trees between where I lived and the then NA hospital. They also perched on electric power lines, but not many like the pigeons. I had an electrician uncle working for the BG Electric Company at Canefield, and he never had any problems with those birds on power lines.

I happened to be in New Amsterdam this week and I was on my feet contemplating the thunderstorm in progress around midnight of Wednesday June 12, when at 00:55hrs Thursday morning, 2 flashes of light a few seconds apart were seen through a partly translucent roof with 80 solar panels on it. Immediately, there was a blackout in NA and I heard the generators of the businesses near me on the Strand kick in and restore power to them. The generators continued working until around 2 pm Thursday. Want to know what happened to the building with the solar power? Nothing: the lights did not even blink. The whole system was connected to a common ground.

Thunderstorms vary in electric field intensity. They interact with the earth-ground system locally, and can severely, but thankfully briefly, distort the electrical ground, which we use as the neutral return for our electricity. I don’t know how the powership is grounded, but the river can conduct the distorted grounding electricity faster than the land. This is a far more plausible explanation than birds attacking power wires at midnight in a thunderstorm. I know that rodents do that at all hours of the day and night; I used to find their dead bodies in electrical panels and conduits and took pictures to show the owners. Perhaps GPL can post pics of the dead vultures; but maybe lightning struck them.

That or a similar thunderstorm moved West to where I live in Georgetown, and I had reports of at least one transformer blowing. Intense electric fields, even if not enough to cause lightning can induce momentary over-currents in transformers and cause destruction by insulation breakdown.

Friday night, June 14, after the scheduled blackout, there was a brownout from about 7 to 9 pm during which I measured between 40 and 70 volts when I should be getting 115 volts. At 50 volts, I measured my 130-watt fridge using 220 watts and more than 5 amp, whereas it should have been using less than 1.5 amp at 115 volts. For those who do not understand the figures, this means that it was heating the fridge circuits 11 times more, reducing its useful lifetime.

I am using actual observations and measurements in this letter in the hope that the people who understand such things in GPL be aware that there are still people around who can understand electricity. And, blackout or no blackout, I beg you, no brownouts. Can’t you at least manage that?

Alfred Bhulai

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Alfred Bhulai, BG Electric Company, Canefield, New Amsterdam, thunderstorm

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