Caribbean Utilities Company faced a possibility during the last two days of rotating island-wide power outages in Grand Cayman.
Problems began about 7.30pm on Monday when unexpected problems with two CUC generating units at the North Sound Road Power Plant caused a shortfall in available generation.
Customer-load shedding automatically occurred, resulting in outages in various districts until 10.40pm.
After an hour, the company rotated outages between areas in order to minimise the impact on any particular area.
CUC personnel worked through the night to restore generating units to meet customer load on Tuesday morning.
‘If it should become necessary to shed customer load at any time today, efforts will be made by the company to keep these outages within 30 minutes to an hour in any one area, and rotated throughout the island until sufficient generation becomes available,’ according to a CUC press release.
The recovery of customer loads after rebuilding has been faster than the company expected, thereby reducing reserve generating capacity.
Coupled with unscheduled problems with existing generating units, this has created the generation shortfall needed to meet customer load, the release said.
CUC is repairing and replacing generating units damaged or lost during Hurricane Ivan.
In May, the company installed temporary portable units to boost the system until damaged units were replaced later this year.
CUC said it recognized the inconvenience to customers as a result of unscheduled outages, and would try to minimise their frequency and duration until the company’s power plant was restored to pre-Ivan capacity, the release concluded.
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