So, as the company's power crisis deepens, all their loyal customers can do at this point is remain patient that soon these black outs will come to an end. Today on Sunup, the company's managers and senior executives discussed plans for near and long term fixes - a dn right now - the priority is to maintain stability on the grid:
Sheena Kuylen Simpson, Manager of system planning & Engineering
"So with that background the system needs generation capacity to meet the demand and the load. When we don't have sufficient generation capacity to meet the load we have to reduce the load or we load shed. So load shedding is basically outages taking off load from the grid because we do not have sufficient generation capacity to meet that load or that demand so in the event that CFE asks us to zero and Ms Dawn mentioned we only have 95 megawatt capacity current on the grid we have to reduce the load to match the generation. So we create necessary schedules proposed schedules based on projected load at the given time and by what percentage we would need to reduce in some cases CFE would initially say we need to 0 and at the given time they announce we can get 20 Megawatts but we won't shed until we need to shed and we only shed what we need to shed so we won't over shed just because we created a schedule and you were on that list. Only what we need to shed we would shed to maintain stability on the grid."
And in terms of a medium term solution - particularly for San Pedro? Well, that's a complicated one because the submarine cable which feeds the inland with power is maxed out in terms of power rating - and it's 25 years old.
BEL plans to put a second cable - but that is a major undertaking:
Sheena Kuylen Simpson, Manager of system planning & Engineering
"So they have seen a lot of unplanned interruptions due to the limitation of the cable unplanned power transformer failure and what we are doing on our end we are doing the necessary studies it's almost finalized we are working on finalizing that for the second submarine cable to San Pedro so they would have two submarine cables feeding the island and because we foresaw that the load would increase and due to the tendering and procurement process that submarine cable would not be in this year it would be in next year so we purchased a gas turbine unit and replaced it in San Pedro and it is already on the ground in San Pedro being commissioned and should be installed by the end of May."
