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Extensive outages hit Saipan anew
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Posted on Jun 02 2008
Saipan experienced extensive power outages yesterday after two engines at Power Plant 1 in Lower Base went down, resulting in the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. failing to generate enough power for the entire island grid.
CUC was 12.7 megawatts short of the power it needed to fully energize the system.
As a result, CUC extended the power rotation from 4pm to 12am, on top of the contingency load shedding that started at 8am yesterday.
CUC executive director Antonio Muna told the media that due to mechanical problem at engines No. 3 and 6, CUC expanded the load shedding schedule by another eight hours beginning at 4pm.
“If all the engines were up at Power Plant 1, we would have 81.2 megawatts available. As of this morning we only had 13 megawatts available,” Muna said.
He said only engines No. 2 and 8 were working, producing 13 megawatts of power. In addition, CUC gets 1.8 megawatts from Power Plant 2 and 13.5 megawatts from Power Plant 4.
“We only had 28.3 megawatts to address roughly about 41 megawatts of the required power at peak load. So we’re short by about 12.7 megawatts,” Muna explained.
He said engine No. 3 normally produces 5 megawatts, while engine No. 6 is capable of 8 megawatts.
“Because of the problem they’ve been having, we’re without the services of those engines. They’re undergoing emergency maintenance,” he said.
Muna said CUC is hopeful that engine No. 3 could be up later last night.
“However, engine No. 6 will most likely continue to be a challenge and may be a two- or three-day effort before it gets up,” he said.
“What we are relying on for power on Saipan is engines 2, 3, 6, and 8. So we are using four engines to power up Saipan. But unfortunately 3 and 6 are down. So we’re short,” he added.
