CUC cancels RFP on two engines because of unresponsive bidders

The Commonwealth Utilities Corp. was forced to cancel a request for proposals to overhaul two engines at Power Plant 1, after the utility company did not get a responsive bid from the two companies that earlier expressed interest.

CUC received a $6 million proposal from Mitsubishi and a $1 million bid from Commonwealth Industrial Supply Co. Inc. to overhaul engines number 5 and 7. But the state of the engines and the guaranteed output affected the bidders, CUC executive director Antonio Muña said yesterday.

“Anyone coming in here is going to look at what’s on the ground is going to be overwhelmed,” Muña said.

“When we start talking about the overhaul, you can go to the manual and go to the page, ‘This is what you need to do on an overhaul,’” he said. “The problem you have is that because of the neglect, you may need more than what the manual says for the overhaul. And that we cannot ascertain until you take the engine apart.”

In order to guarantee there is 85 percent output, all parts need to be looked at, like the auxiliary, cooling and piping systems, when overhauling an engine, Muña said.

Mitsubishi could not guarantee 85 percent output, while CISCO could guarantee the required output but would not be able to overhaul the electrical system, something CUC needs, he added.

CUC will now decide if it will overhaul the engines itself or try another request for proposals.

“We need to revisit as far as either doing it ourselves, going out and redoing the bid… maybe tweak it a little bit,” he said.

There are some things CUC can learn from the process, Muña said. For the past year-and-a-half there have been no detailed logs on what has been done on the engines.

“When you buy a vehicle, sometimes you want to look at what kind of history it has,” he said.

But Muña added, “It’s not to blame anyone at the plant, the blame game isn’t where we’re at. It’s about fixing the problem. How do you correct not having records? It’s not about going backwards. It’s about going forward.”

CUC put out the request for proposals in the latter part of July for the overhaul work on engines number 5 and 7.

CUC initiated the emergency RFP after it terminated the contract of the previous contractor, Guam-based DCM Group, in July 2008 after the company reportedly failed to repair the generators as required by the $5.1 million deal.