Officials at the Grand Bahama Power Company are explaining the cause of outages on Grand Bahama last week.
Communications Director Cleopatra Russell said, “we experienced some challenges at our energy plant where we had a major mechanical failure on one of our systems. That major mechanical failure made it very difficult for us to safely be able to generate at our WSP Plant. We would have made an assessment and realized that it was in our best interest to keep those engines off and attempt to bring them up one by one. We made multiple attempts and there were some challenges. We possibly could have brought them up sooner but there would have been safety issues had we done so.”
Russell further explained, “our base plant which is our Peal Street plant two of the three engines there were available so we did not have an island wide outage. We however did have to engage, in what we would consider, rolling outages where we attempted to minimize the impact but to share the load in the inconvenience. Some customers were out for, I think, up to three of four hours and that’s really because of the areas where they were located. Some areas carry a larger load and so it much more difficult when you have load constraints to be able to bring that area up and keep them energized.”
Russell says that the Grand Bahama Power Company has an aggressive maintenance program that they are following to ensure that engines are maintained proactively and that the company is prepared for the increased energy demand in the summer months.
