The island’s power company said Monday the newest diesel generator is to be overhauled. Random, long and island-wide electricity outages have been the norm for the past few weeks.
Kendall Lee, Acting Managing Director of Montserrat Utilities Ltd. (MUL) released a statement on Monday evening to apologise to customers “for the frequent interruptions to the electricity service that have been occurring recently.”
The outages, the statement read, have been due to issues being experienced with the control system of the main 1.5MW medium speed diesel generator (Genset #7) at the power station and with the automatic load shedding schemes on the feeder control panels. In addition to this, other technical problems are also being experienced on the other three high speed generators.
Genset #7 went live 17 months and MUL says the issues with the controls are still unresolved. “The MUL technical team are being assisted by the technical support staff at the manufacturers, ABC Diesels of Belgium and the team at Angelique International Limited, the turn key contractors for the power station project.
“Supplies island wide have now been restored, but the power plant is operating without reserve capacity, meaning that the security of the supply is still compromised.”
Major maintenance work is planned on the main speed generator and shortly after that, a complete overhaul of the 1.8MW High Speed Diesel Generator (Gentset #5) which should take place during the month of October.
Lee added that the completion of these two major maintenance routines will put the power station back in a secure position.
