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Construction activities & road accidents primary cause of power outages in 2024 – GPL
Kaieteur News- Heavy infrastructural works -public and private- and road accidents were the primary causes of power outages in 2024, GPL’s Divisional Director of Transmission and Distribution, Shaun Hamlet, disclosed.
Construction activities & road accidents primary cause of power outages in 2024 – GPL
Hamlet was at the time providing a review of GPL’s performance for transmission and distribution to the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) during a public hearing on Thursday.
In her presentation, Hamlet detailed that in terms of customer interruption for 2024, when compared to 2023, there was an increase in service interruption, pointing specifically to the frequency duration of interruptions.
“So, our target for 2024 for the frequency of interruption is 85 and we would not have achieved that target and actually we recorded 123, and the duration, instead of 90, we would have passed that and recorded 122,” she stated.
Hamlet further revealed that the power generation company would have accounted for most of the outages, noting that they were mainly due to external factors.
“External factors, meaning as a result of construction activities, farming activities- construction activities mainly private and public. Now, most of these outages occurred along the Region 4 area, primarily along the East Coast corridor, where there is heavy infrastructure and development works as well as development works also along the East Bank, mainly in the vicinity of Eccles, Grove, Diamond and Craig area, so approximately 49 %,” she explained
Another major factor she listed was vehicular accidents impacting utility infrastructure. Hamlet noted that this accounted for 17 percent of power outages.
“External factors; where you have accidents, construction and farming equipment coming into contact with transmission lines and construction works (public and private works),” she added.
That aside, the Director said that GPL had its shortfalls that also resulted in outages. “GPL factors… there are overloaded feeders driven by unprecedented growth, hence, plans to upgrade and build redundancies weakened poles structures as a result of soil erosion and construction activities.”
She said that with the country’s construction boom, larger equipment are traversing the roadways, causing tremendous soil movement. Another challenge Hamlet said the company experienced is the migration of staff.
“We would have experienced a lot of staff who have migrated to the oil and gas sector and the skill- which is a unique skill in utility work- is not readily available,” she said.
(Construction activities & road accidents primary cause of power outages in 2024 – GPL)
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