Hundreds of businesses, schools and homes were without electricity on Monday after an island-wide outage which occurred from around 7:29 in the morning.
By three in the evening, half of the Barbados Light and Power Company’s “around 130 000” customers had their power restored. Managing Director of the Barbados Light and Power (BL&P) Company, Roger Blackman stated that full restoration was anticipated after six in the evening.
During a conference call with the media, he further explained that the outage was caused by “a fault” which originated at the company’s substation which is adjacent to the Spring Garden Generation Plant. He said BL&P “identified and isolated that fault and started restoration at around 8:48 a.m.”
Blackman however pointed out that “during the restoration process some of our generators experienced challenges similar to what we have experienced or encountered last week when we had fuel equipment issues on two of our largest generators which was delaying full restoration”.
“We would have had fuel pump challenges and we have been having discussions with our fuel supplier in relation to addressing that issue. In the meanwhile, we have teams working on both units replace the affected equipment and return those units… that is now expected to be late afternoon.”
Blackman further stated that BL&P has implemented measures to tackle the issues they have been facing in relation to fuel. He said work is “ongoing to investigate and determine exactly what corrective measures need to be taken but again, until that is fully resolved we are in a delicate situation in relation to that plan”.
“Our heavy fuel oil units represent maybe 70 per cent of total generation and so it is going to be critical that we resolve this issue going forward and to ensure that we don’t continue to experience the unreliability challenges that we have been experiencing.” (MG)