‘There should be no more outages’

Due to some technical adjustments, the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. received only eight of the 13 megawatts from the Aggreko generators through yesterday afternoon, but the additional megawatts were expected to go online by the end of the evening.

“We anticipate to start bringing in the rest by the evening,” said CUC Power Division manager Gary Camacho. “Like most times when you start something new, there are adjustments to be made.”

Camacho said the adjustments were made to the Aggreko equipment.

As of yesterday afternoon, there was no load shedding on the island, Camacho said.

“So far so good,” he added.

The last island outage occurred at 9:30 Friday night. CUC does not anticipate any more outages to occur, he said.

With Aggreko’s eight megawatts, CUC’s 14 megawatts and privately-operated Power Plant 4’s 13 to 14 megawatts, the island was running on approximately 35 to 36 megawatts yesterday afternoon. Approximately 41 megawatts of power are needed to sufficiently power the island 24-hours a day.

On Friday, Gov. Benigno Fitial turned on the first of 16 Aggreko generators. The 15 others were turned on afterward, expected to provide 13 megawatts of power to the island. Two more generators, producing two megawatts of power, are expected to arrive next week.

Earlier in the week, CUC executive director Antonio Muña said there should be no outages once the generators are fully operational.

“We didn’t bring Aggreko in here so we could still load shed,” he said.

There have been questions raised whether the 15 megawatts supplied by the emergency generators would be enough to supply the island the necessary amount of megawatts.

In the last few weeks, as little as 19 megawatts have been provided for the island, with five megawatts coming from CUC’s two plants.

Muña said Aggreko’s 15 megawatts will allow the individual engines at the plants to be rotated, allowing time for more maintenance and repair.

For example, Muña said, at Power Plant 1, CUC crews currently try to continually run the four engines to provide as much power to the island as possible. But once the emergency generators are operational, the engines will be worked on a rotating schedule, allowing for more maintenance.

After the Aggreko generators reach full capacity, Muña said he is anticipating Power Plant 4 to produce 14 megawatts, Power Plant 1 to produce 10 megawatts, and Power Plant 2 to carry six to eight.

“The key thing is to make sure all of the assets are there,” he said.

Under the Aggreko contract, CUC must pay $6 million as rent for the generators. CUC paid a down payment of $1.5 million for the initial shipment. They must pay Aggreko an additional $536,000 within 30 days.