Engine trouble trips power supply

Saipan’s villages experienced power outages yesterday due to engine trouble at the Commonwealth Utilities Corp.’s Power Plant 1, even as the utility firm assured that fuel supplies at its power plants are enough to sustain power generation until Mobil’s fuel tanker arrives today.

CUC said one of the engines at Power Plant 1, Engine No. 5, went down at around 2:10am due to a problem at the main water cooling system, resulting in power outage at 11:08am in villages supplied by its Feeder 2.

Feeder 2, together with Feeder 3, covers the villages from Garapan to San Jose, according to acting CUC executive director Tony Guerrero.

CUC said it restored Feeder 2’s power distribution at around 1:43pm, after nearly three hours of interruption.

CUC also said another engine at Power Plant 1, Engine No. 6, automatically tripped off at around 1:25pm, which caused power outages in villages supplied with electricity by Feeders 3, 4 and 7.

“The cause was a high temperature on the jacket water cooling system. In order to prevent overloading with the other engines, Feeders 4 and 7 were manually tripped off at around 1:25pm,” CUC said.

According to Guerrero, Feeder 4 supplies power to Capitol Hill, while Feeder 7 distributes power to villages in northern Saipan, including Tanapag and San Roque.

CUC said it restored Feeder 4 at around 1:41pm and Feeder 7 about three minutes later. It added, though, that Feeder 3 had to be turned off at around 1:25pm to restore Feeder 2’s power distribution.

CUC said it later restored the two engines to normal operations by 2:21pm.

Guerrero also assured that the tanker would arrive on Saipan on schedule last night. He said actual delivery of some 1.1 million gallons of fuel would take place this morning.

He said the tanker delivery would supply enough fuel to sustain power generation in the next 18 to 20 days.

Guerrero said Wednesday that CUC received $2 million from the government for the payment of the tanker delivery. Since the week before Christmas Day, government subsidy for CUC’s fuel purchase has totaled $3.5 million. The subsidy averted rolling blackouts during the holiday season after the CUC initially implemented power load shedding last Dec. 20 and 21.

The CUC has been suffering from a cash flow problem, despite its average monthly collection of $6 million. The monthly collections include fuel surcharge on top of the cost of customers’ power consumption.