NASSAU, BAHAMAS — Bahamas Power and Light (BPL) said yesterday that a major cable fault and subsequent generation loss resulted in a supply disruption for its customers across New Providence Wednesday night.
The company in a statement noted that a fault occurred on a cable between its Soldier Road substation and Blue Hill Road Power Station on Wednesday evening.
“It created a domino effect that caused several units at both the Blue Hill Road and Clifton Pier Power Stations to trip offline. At the time, more than 100MW of generation was temporarily unavailable and supply was lost to approximately 50 percent of customers in New Providence,” the company said.
“BPL’s team responded immediately to conduct an initial assessment of the cable failure and to begin returning the units to service. Supply restoration commenced within an hour of the initial outage, which occurred around 6:30 pm.
BPL was able to restore supply to almost all customers by 11 pm on Wednesday night as all but two units (one at Clifton Pier and the other at Blue Hills) were back in service,” the company said.
“While teams focused on returning the units to service, repairs also commenced on the damaged underground cable out of the Soldier Road substation. This prevented BPL from restoring supply to the last group of impacted customers who are supplied from that Soldier Road substation. This included customers in the Gleniston Gardens, Sea Breeze, Marathon, Soldier Road and surrounding areas. The cable repairs were completed overnight, and supplies were restored early Thursday morning.”
The company apologized to its customers but at also classified Wednesday’s major fault, temporary engine loss and subsequent outage as an “extraordinary event.”
“The company advises that while it works to prevent major system losses, faults of this magnitude are rare but unavoidable as increasing temperatures and higher-than-normal demands create additional stressors on BPL’s generation and transmission & distribution network. When they do occur, BPL responds immediately, as it did on Wednesday, to carry out repairs and restore supply to its customers,” BPL said.
