rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt
T&T Electricity Commission customers may have noticed an increased frequency of outages over the past few months. Well, according to T&TEC general manager Kelvin Ramsook, this is partly because of high fuel prices which have forced the commission to rely less on maintaining standby capacity as a backup when issues affect power generation.
“We don’t run with a significant amount of spinning reserve, which we can do, which could assist in avoiding these short interruptions and the reason is quite simple. If I run with spinning reserve, I’m going to be using gas which is very costly,” Ramsook said.
T&TEC currently owes the National Gas Company (NGC) $7 billion and in September, Minister of Finance Colm Imbert said the commission had purchased gas at $700 million annually over the last decade.
With these high operational costs, Ramsook said the commission is now opting to engage standby generation only after an incident occurs.
“We try to run the grid in such a way that if we lose supply, once we lose supply, we quickly call the independent power producers and bring on a machine quickly if we have to and put back power onto the grid,” he said.
He said while this system results in outages, they are typically rectified within 25 to 30 minutes.
Ramsook said the commission has been relying less on standby capacity for the majority of this year.
The latest of the blackouts occurred at 10.05 pm on Monday and around 2.05 am on Tuesday, affecting some 10 per cent of customers. According to a release from T&TEC yesterday, the company experienced faults on its system stemming from issues with several generator units at one of the Independent Power Producers (IPPs) supplying bulk electricity to the commission.
“As a result, on both occasions, the system automatically shed customers in Trinidad to match the reduced capacity that was available,” the release said.
“The system to automatically shed customers, called the Underfrequency Scheme, is designed to avoid back-to-back outages to the same group of customers.”
Following the incident, it said T&TEC instructed the other IPPs to immediately increase output to their full available capacity and to make standby generation available.
Ramsook said the trips to this IPP are because of an increased demand on it for electricity supply. He said they are currently in discussions with the IPP to have the issue resolved.
“We have made contact with the Independent Power Producers because the frequency of the operations have increased at a particular location and we’re having dialogue and discussion with the Independent Power Producer because the frequency of these trips have increased, that’s why you’re seeing it a bit more often,” he said.
He admits this problem is more easily rectified than the operational costs to maintain reserve capacity.
“The issue with the IPP is doing everything to avoid the trips but the issue of the reserves, I don’t see changing in the very near future because I said it’s a cost to have standby equipment running that you may never use. When called upon, fine, but it’s very costly,” he said.
Ramsook said while they are trying to mitigate the issues at the IPPs to bring down the frequency of trips to that facility, it is inevitable there will still be some incidents. Coupled with the decreased reliance on the standby generators, he said there will be further outages ahead.
“Given how we run the grid, I want to repeat, if we were to have - and machines will trip, you can’t have a system working at 100 per cent...so whenever that happens, you will have some interruptions for a short period,” he said.
Guardian Media reached out to Minister of Public Utilities Marvin Gonzales for comment on the matter yesterday but got no response up to news time.
