BELCO: Outages were not caused by increased summertime demand

TUESDAY, JULY 17: Bermuda Electric Light Company Limited (BELCO) wishes to assure the public that it has more than adequate capacity to meet expected load on the system this summer, and that outages on Saturday and Monday were unrelated to increased summertime electricity demand.

BELCO’s Central Plant currently has generating capacity of approximately 152 megawatts (MW). The highest load recorded on the system so far this summer has been 110 MW, which is well below plant capacity and approximately 10% below 2011 and 2010 summertime peak loads.

Saturday’s and Monday’s outages started in BELCO’s East Power Station, when several newer engines were forced out of service by electrical and mechanical faults, which resulted in load being shed from the system. The company’s Operations and Engineering Groups have identified some anomalies that coincided to cause this unusual outage and steps are being taken to address the issues.

Load shedding is designed to occur quickly to protect the system from total shutdown by cutting off supply to circuits and happens without notice. Saturday’s widespread outage affected the majority of load shed circuits. The load shed circuits are rotated from time to time to minimise customers being affected repeatedly. Note: certain circuits are never included in the rotation, such as those serving the hospital, airport and City of Hamilton.

BELCO apologises for the inconvenience to its customers. Every effort is being made to ensure that BELCO’s system is safe, secure and reliable for the benefit of customers and the Island as a whole.