BL&PC outlines cause of Tuesday’s power outage

 

The Barbados Light & Power Company confirmed Friday that Tuesday’s islandwide power outage, which forced some businesses and government offices to close early, started at its Spring Garden plant.

Director of Operations Johann Greaves in a statement explained: “While investigating a fault on one of the generator’s circuit breaker, a flash over occurred. The safety protection equipment on adjacent generating units detected this fault resulting in them tripping offline. This led to cascading effects with other utility and distributed renewable energy systems tripping leading to an island-wide power outage. Thankfully we can report that no one was injured during the incident.”

Greaves said the company immediately activated its Black Start procedures which begin with verifying the safety of personnel (employees, contractors and the public) and identifying and isolating the fault. This was followed by the restoration of generation, and reenergizing the transmission and distribution network.

“Once power was returned to the grid, we sought to bring back service to critical commercial customers such as the hospital, the air and seaports, and Bridgetown. By 1 p.m., we had the first of these restored and within the hour, power was returned to all critical customers, Bridgetown and environs. 75 per cent of customers had regained power supply by 3 p.m., and by 5:17 p.m., all customers across the island were safely restored,” he added.

The power company has submitted an initial report to the Fair Trading Commission and has started a full investigation into the incident to identify the root cause of the problem. A final report will be submitted within six weeks.

BL&P pledged that any corrective actions identified in the investigation would be implemented as it expressed regret for the inconvenience caused.