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Wednesday, February 19, 2025

T&TEC boss admits power outage headaches ahead

by

Rishard Khan
833 days ago
20221108
T&TEC general manager  Kelvin Ramsook

T&TEC general manager Kelvin Ramsook

COURTESY T&TEC

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.


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