Administration officials said rotating power outages would continue due to overheating and broken engines at its main power plant, Power Plant I, in Lower Base.<\/p>\n
Commonwealth Utilities Corp. acting executive director Tony Guerrero said during Friday\u2019s news briefing at the Governor\u2019s Office that overheating is also caused by a malfunctioning cooling system.<\/p>\n
Guerrero also disclosed that the plant\u2019s newly repaired engine 8 is broken again, leaving only six engines to work round the clock.<\/p>\n
Engine 4 has remained down since last year due to a broken crankshaft.<\/p>\n
The government has a pending contract for the procurement and installation of these parts. <\/p>\n
Guerrero said Engine 8\u2019s newly installed bolts are faulty. <\/p>\n
The previous leadership of CUC had paid the contractor, Singapore-based Man B&W Diesel, some $400,000 for the installation of about 690 foundation bolts.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe government spent quite a huge amount of money there, but it turned out to be a failure,\u201d said Lt. Gov. Tim P. Villagomez, who has emergency control of CUC.<\/p>\n
He said the old contractor is being requested to repair its work.<\/p>\n
Villagomez said the administration is proceeding with the repair of Power Plant II engines to generate an additional 10MW.<\/p>\n
This plant had been fixed during the previous administration, resulting in the generation of some 4MW. By design, though, Power Plant 2 has a capacity of 15MW.<\/p>\n
Villagomez said he hopes to get a contractor to do the repair on the engines by next week.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just don\u2019t have enough reserve. That\u2019s the reason why we\u2019re experiencing outages,\u201d said Guerrero.<\/p>\n
He said Power Plant I is currently generating 53MW. By design, the power plant can generate up to 81MW.<\/p>\n
Saipan consumes some 60 to 65MW daily.<\/p>\n
$40M BOND<\/p>\n
Villagomez said the dire situation at the power plant necessitates the issuance of a $40-million revenue bond from the NMI Retirement Fund.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s why the $40 million bond is important. A lot of this money would go toward this repair,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The bond proposal is embodied in the administration-proposed legislative measure, the Defined Benefit Rescue and Reform Act of 2006, which also asks the Fund to write off $124 million \u201cuncollectibles\u201d or unfunded liability.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Administration officials said rotating power outages would continue due to overheating and broken engines at its main power plant, Power Plant I, in Lower Base.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}