Nation in darkness as new turbine fails 1st test
Just before three this morning much of the country was plunged into darkness after electrical storms in Mexico tripped Belize’s power supply from the Comission Federal de Electricidad (C.F.E.). But, as you might recall, after the last series of blackouts, Belize Electricity Limited had promised that its new gas turbine at Mile Eight would have the lights back on twenty minutes into any power failure. So what went wrong? According to B.E.L.’s Vice President of Energy Supply, Derek Davis, faulty wiring and bad weather on the ground are to blame.
Derek Davis, V.P., Energy Supply, B.E.L.
“The first problem was related to black-starting with the gas turbine. As you know, this unit was designed, this was one of the purposes it was designed for, but it’s one of the things you cannot test so easily because it only happens when the system goes dead. So the point is, when we tried to do it, it didn’t work. We had technical problems, the breaker didn’t close, and so we had to use other options to get it going.”
Janelle Chanona
“Now for the ordinary person who doesn’t know what black-starting is, what is it that you tried to do?”
Derek Davis
“Black starting basically is that you have a dead system. You do not have power anywhere and then, in other words, these plants use auxiliaries like electric motors and so on and you have to find some small diesel unit to power them and then power up the bigger generator and get major power to the grid; so you are starting from totally dead system.”
Janelle Chanona
“But you all have a power generator at mile eight. That didn’t kick over?”
Derek Davis
“Yes, that kicked over, that worked and we got the unit up to what we call up to running speed and everything. But what fell down on us was that the breaker itself, there is some wiring problem on the breaker that it did not close on to the dead bus. It could not sense that the bus was dead and closed.”
Janelle Chanona
“And then the second set of problems…you had some personnel problems getting out there?”
Derek Davis
“Yeah, we had some people getting out to the site. This was three in the morning and we had to find people to get to the site. And after that, we had to find people and get them to the Belize City plant. We then had to use the diesel generators in Belize City to start up the system and get power to mile eight, so we could synchronize, as opposed to starting on a black dead system.”
So was last night the last of the black outs? Wwweeellll, not really. Davis says power generated from Mile Eight, Mollejon and the diesel generators are keeping the lights on right now. But, if C.F.E. doesn’t get its act together by the peak hours tonight, the electricity company will have to consider systematically shutting down sections of the grid until things are back to normal across the border.
Derek Davis
“We can with the water flow we presently have, we can supply our demand through the end of the day. And after that we would have to look at load shedding options…at least temporarily.”
Janelle Chanona
“A.K.A. rotating blackouts?”
Derek Davis
“Rotating blackouts until we can get some generation or until C.F.E. comes online, whichever comes first.”
Janelle Chanona
“That would be just in the city or countrywide?”
Derek Davis
“Well we would look at the country as a whole.”
We are reliably informed that as of five o’clock this evening the full twenty-five megawatts of power from Mexico has been flowing smoothly into the Belizean grid.
