The lone electricity provider in Grand Cayman warned Tuesday of potential power outages throughout the Island during the next four days as a temporary lack of generating capacity has been caused by equipment failure.
Caribbean Utilities Company has engineers on site in the largest of the three Cayman Islands trying to restore its diesel-fed engines to full working condition, said Pat Bynoe-Clarke, manager of corporate communications for CUC. But Ms Bynoe-Clarke said various parts of Grand Cayman may experience temporary outages throughout the rest of the work week as the electricity provider scrambles to restore its facilities.
Ms Bynoe-Clarke said Tuesday in the event of outages, CUC will try to limit those failures to one hour per area, where possible.
“Some of the company’s generating units were off-line for regular planned maintenance,” she said. “However, over the past 48 hours, we experienced additional unexpected failures. At this point we do not anticipate any permanent damage to any of the units.
“At this point, all repairs are expected to be completed within the next four days,” she added.
No additional information was available by press time Tuesday. The Caymanian Compass newspaper had not been made aware of any significant outages as of early Tuesday afternoon.
Tuesday morning’s warning comes in the wake of an islandwide power outage on the morning of 25 July that crippled businesses and inconvenienced residents for several hours. That outage, which hit all areas of Grand Cayman, was later blamed on a fault in the transmission system in the Hydesville Substation in West Bay.
Andrew Small, vice president of transmission for CUC, said after the 25 July outage that struck about 6.30am that the problem at the substation in West Bay triggered several of the utility company’s generating units to shut down, resulting in power failures across the Island. However, Mr. Small said that outage apparently caused no lasting damage to the system’s infrastructure. Most customers had power restored later that afternoon, the company reported.
Ms Bynoe-Clarke said Tuesday that the recent issues are not related to the islandwide outage in July.
“Islandwide outages such as what was experienced [25 July] occur from time to time on small island power systems such as in Grand Cayman,” Mr. Small said on 26 July. “As a result of the restoration to date there appears to be no major equipment damage from the outage which will impact customer reliability.”
Vital services throughout Grand Cayman, including hospitals and air transportation, have backup generators and are said to be able to weather outages relatively well. But for many businesses, namely those without adequate alternative power sources, open hours and potential sales are often lost during outages as companies tell employees to stay home and their doors remain closed. Many residents and tourists are also forced to sweat it out as air conditioning systems and electrical fans won’t work to combat stifling heat and humidity.
“CUC has one of the highest levels of reliability in the region and compares well with most North American utilities,” Ms Bynoe-Clarke said. “On average, our customers experience total outages of less than four hours per year. However, these types of issues do occur from time-to-time resulting in the company having to shed load on a temporary basis.
“Our comprehensive generating capacity planning ensures that these occurrences and inconveniences to our customers are kept to a minimum,” she added.
CUC, which began operations as the only electricity utility in Grand Cayman in 1966, has a generating capacity of 151 megawatts and serves more than 26,000 commercial and residential customers. A record peak load of 102.086 megawatts was experienced on 3 June, 2010.
The company possesses an exclusive electricity generation licence expiring in 2029 and an exclusive transmission and distribution licence expiring in 2028.
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This is the major reason the CUC Renewable Energy policy called FIT does not work. People that have solar power need to have NET metering where we store our own backup power in battery banks and sell back our extra power, helping out CUC and the country when CUC is having power shortages problems like this. Renewable energy with NET metering is the what the Cayman Islands needs!!!!
The rest of the world has NET metering for these reasons. It is the right choice.
It’s amazes me that no one is asking the real questions.
With the quarterly profit margin that CUC generates.
It baffles me why they would have any outages at all!
Sounds like they take most of their profits and give it to the investors. Instead of investing in the people, that make them, their profits.
Why do they not have backup generators, in every facility? It’s not like they are a new company.
…. exclusive electricity generation licence expiring in 2029 and an exclusive transmission and distribution licence expiring in 2028 …..
Whoaa, who’s bright idea was that EXCLUSIVE part, and, was there any service level requirement?
If CUC has 150 MW capacity and the MAXIMUM load ever was only 100 MW then there is AT LEAST a third of their capacity unavailable. That smells like lack of infra-structure investment.
They need some competition and there also needs to be incentives to help reduce demand.
I believe the Airport switched to low energy LED lighting and saved over 4,000 dollars a month, Imagine if all Cayman did the same!
But while there are EXCLUSIVE licences, CUC has a vested interest in seeing that any energy efficiency measures are strangled at birth.