OBIGLIO
JAMAICA ENERGY Partners, the largest of independent suppliers of electricity to the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPS) grid, confirmed yesterday that its system tripped during Saturday's national power blackout.
But James Zimmer, the head of Jamaica Private Power Company, whose 60-megawatt facility also supplies electricity to the national grid, declined to confirm or deny that his company was part of the shut-down as has been claimed by JPS.
"We do not conduct our business in the media, so I am gonna say 'no comment' on any question that you ask of me," Zimmer told Wednesday Business.
The Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR), which polices the energy sector, has launched an investigation into blackout that left most of Jamaica without electricity for more than eight hours on Saturday, and the Government has asked for the help of Canadian experts with the job.
PRIMARY FOCUS
The primary focus of that investigation is likely to be the JPS, the light and power company that is owned by Atlanta-based Mirant Corporation, which has a monopoly on power distribution in Jamaica and accounts for approximately 64 per cent of Jamaica's commercial generating capacity of 814 megawatts.
The shutdown, as a public relation exercise, could hardly have come at a worse time for JPS, a mere five days after the announcement by Mirant that it has put up its 80 per cent stake in the company for sale, and with consumer confidence in the company lower because of high electricity rates and a review that the firm is insensitive to complaints.
JPS has attributed the blackout, which halted commerce Saturday afternoon and stymied regular Saturday night entertainment sessions, to four main factors:
* A number of weather-related problems, including lightning strikes on sections of the company's power system.
* A trip on the 69 kilovolt transmission line between its electricity generating plant in Bogue, St. James, and Duncans, Trelawny.
* A voltage collapse on a num-ber of substations; and
* A loss of power supply from a number of its own generating units as well as those belonging to the private suppliers.
JPS suggested that there were only seconds between the cascading events, but has not been specific in its public statements which units shut down or the technical issues surrounding them.
But while Zimmer gave short shrift to questions about what might have happened at his plant, on a stationary barge at Old Harbour, St. Catherine, Wayne McKenzie, the general manager of JEP, confirmed that his, and other plants shut down during the blackout.
"Yes, we did trip," McKenzie told Wednesday Business. "Everybody tripped. Every generating unit on the grid tripped. That's what JPS said over the weekend ... and today in the newspapers. They said everybody."
McKenzie's reference was to a advertisement in the press by JPS's just-installed president and CEO, Damian Obiglio, in which he apologised to consumers and attempted to explain the sequence of events leading up to the blackout at 4:16 p.m. and the aftermath of the shutdown.
SELF-START PROCEDURES
"Within two minutes of the event we initiated selfstart procedures at the major generating stations and started the establishment of transmission inter-connection paths between the major power plants in order to stabilise the system," Obiglio said in his statement.
He reiterated JPS's earlier statement that power began to return within two hours, but that full restoration took eight and a half hours.
"Our priority now is to complete the investigation (into why the shutdown occurred) in the shortest possible time, while ensuring that we keep the lights on for you, our customers," Obiglio said.
Yesterday OUR officials were meeting with JPS managers to discuss the company's pre-liminary report on the outage and to determine how to proceed on the fuller investigation, which the Government has insisted they should include independent experts.
Obigio said that the findings from that analysis will be made public.
