The Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) is at­tribut­ing pow­er out­ages that oc­curred this morn­ing at 6.55 a.m. to a load-shed­ding event on their sys­tem, stem­ming from is­sues with mul­ti­ple gen­er­a­tor units at In­de­pen­dent Pow­er Pro­duc­ers (IPPs) sup­ply­ing bulk elec­tric­i­ty to T&TEC.

In a re­lease, T&TEC stat­ed that “as a re­sult of the re­duced gen­er­a­tion, the sys­tem au­to­mat­i­cal­ly shed cus­tomers in Trinidad to match the ca­pac­i­ty that was avail­able. The IPPs were im­me­di­ate­ly in­struct­ed to restart the

gen­er­a­tors and bring on ad­di­tion­al ma­chines where nec­es­sary.”

T&TEC re­vealed that twen­ty per cent of their cus­tomers were im­pact­ed with out­ages and they were “out of sup­ply for 35 min­utes on av­er­age.” They added that at “7.41 a.m. all cus­tomers were back on sup­ply.”

The state­ment ex­plained that the sys­tem to au­to­mat­i­cal­ly shed cus­tomers in the event of sud­den crit­i­cal loss of gen­er­a­tion, called the Un­der­fre­quen­cy Scheme, is specif­i­cal­ly de­signed to min­imise lo­calised im­pact. As a re­sult, per­sons in wide­ly sep­a­rat­ed lo­ca­tions across Trinidad were af­fect­ed.

The In­de­pen­dent Pow­er Pro­duc­ers are re­quired to sub­mit a re­port to T&TEC in the short­est pos­si­ble time­frame.

T&TEC al­so apol­o­gised for the dis­rup­tion and in­con­ve­nience their cus­tomers faced due to the out­ages.

Some of the places that re­port­ed be­ing af­fect­ed by out­ages were:

St Au­gus­tine

Siparia

Bon air

En­ter­prise

Av­o­cat

Arou­ca

Cunu­pia

Fyz­abad

Preysal

Cou­va

El So­cor­ro

Val­sayn

Curepe