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, nor had the Caymanian Compass newspaper been made aware of any significant outages as yet.
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.
For more on this story see Wednesday’s Caymanian Compass.
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CUC needs to get with the 21st century and install industrial gas turbines for power generation instead of antiquated, inefficient diesel gensets.
GT’s are more efficient, reliable and produce lower emissions. In a combined cycle application the exhaust heat makes steam for basically free power from a steam turbine. Could easily cut the electric cost to the rate payers by 25%.
I agree in principal, but what would be the source of the natural gas needed? I think it would require the importation of liquified natural gas which in turn would entail considerable infrastructure and transportation issues.