Light and Power restoring electricity after island wide outage

Article by SAT

The Barbados Light & Power Company is gradually restoring electricity after the island suffered an outage at 7:29 a.m. today.

The company said it was caused by a “fault in a substation” adjacent to the Spring Garden Generation Plant.

Earlier today, managing director Roger Blackman provided an update on Starcom Network’s Down to Brass Tacks radio programme.

The company had generation issues last week and also had a problem with fuel supplied by the Barbados National Oil Company.

roger-blackman “The generating capacity was such that we would have been able to meet the day’s demand. However, we had this fault in the substation and that caused all of the generators to trip,” Blackman told moderator David Ellis.

“Ultimately, it caused an island wide shutdown. In the restoration, bringing things back up, we had some fuel pump issues on some of those units. That means we are still currently short of generation, similar to how we would have been last Monday. So the trigger today was a fault in a sub-station. In the restoration, however, the situation has been compounded by the current challenges that we have been experiencing with fuel.”

Blackman said they have put some steps in place to manage the fuel issue going forward, “but it is such a significant amount of generation that is dependent on it that we need to get to the bottom of that and resolve that issue”.

Light & Power expects full restoration by 6 p.m. and will brief the media at 3 p.m. In the meantime, the company has instituted its load sharing procedures to mitigate the impact to customers.

The following areas are reported to have been restored:

Sunbury, Church Village, Dodds, Massiah Street, Bayfield, Mangrove, Rices, Crane, West, Lower and Upper Carlton, The Garden, Porters, Mullins, Gibbs, Arch Hall, Welches, Melrose, parts of Jackson, Edgehill, Bridgefield, Whitehall (St Thomas), Dukes, Rock Hall, Hillaby, Lion Castle, Sturges, Welchman Hall, Castle Grant, Horse Hill, Easy Hall, Salters, Charles Rowe Bridge, My Lords Hill, Welches, Rendezvous, (South Coast) Worthing To Atlantic Shores/Enterprise, Oistins, Maxwell, Hythe Garden, Thornbury Hill, Miami Beach Area, Pegwell, Enterprise, Carter’s Gap, Cheapside, Fontabelle, Bath Village, St Martins, Charnocks, Garrison to Rendezvous, Rockley, Worthing, Bay St, Bayland, Bay View, Culloden, Lower Broad Street, Swan Street, Tudor Street, Baxters Road, Mapp Hill, St Davids and their environs. (PR/SAT)