Water and Power Authority Chief Executive Karl Knight reported to the utility’s governing board Thursday that power should stabilize for customers on St. Thomas and St. John after several weeks of “flirting with disaster.”
“It’s been a very eventful month of September thus far, and we’re still … just about halfway through the month, so who knows what else the month holds for us,” he said before acknowledging that customers on St. Thomas and St. John have been particularly inconvenienced in recent weeks. “It has been a very difficult patch for us, and underpinning most of those events is essentially a shortage of generation capacity.”
Knight said the authority has been running “thinly” with two generators at the Randolph Harley Power Plant — units 23 and 27 — offline, and the summer’s heightened power demands stretched capacity further.
“Unit 27 had been down for several weeks now,” he said. “We had — earlier this year — briefly got it back online. It gave us some breathing room for about two, maybe three weeks, and then it faltered again for an unrelated issue. We have repaired the fuel pumps and some other matters, and we’ve gotten Unit 27 back online.”
Knight said years of deferred maintenance have caught up to the authority, which is unable to take its legacy units offline for major overhauls.
“And so as we fix one component, some other component becomes due for repairs. And so we’ve had our challenges,” he said. At least one recent issue occurred when one of the utility’s newer Wartsila generators developed a leak in its air delivery system Wednesday. “And so that air leak caused the other unaffected units to also trip offline, because they … share a common air system.”
As a result, the district lost 36 megawatts of generation. Knight said they were able to fix the problem and “breathe a sigh of relief” before thunderstorms roiled the territory.
“What I will say is, lightning is not our friend. Rain is usually not a problem. I know a lot of folks, especially in the social media sphere, their belief is ‘oh that little bit of rain and now you’re out,’” he said. “You know, the two enemies of the electrical system are wind blowing obstructions into the lines and lightning striking the system.”
The weather had less of an impact on St. Croix, where Knight said only three or four feeders were offline at any given time. He attributed those outages to lightning strikes.
Knight’s report came after the board approved a handful of contracts, including a nearly $3.39 million agreement with the Island Roads Corporation for the Blackbeard Hill waterline rehabilitation project. Island Roads Corporation was also awarded a $2.72 million contract for the Mahogany Estate waterline rehabilitation. Board members also approved a $181,297 cost reduction to its contract with J. Benton related to undergrounding work in Hannah’s Rest.
Board Chair Maurice Muia asked WAPA mechanical engineer Matthias Clark how many times the authority has reduced costs for a project.
“To my knowledge,” Clark said, “none that I’ve worked on. So yes, this might be the first — at least for me.”
The board then approved a $293,964 cost reduction to the authority’s contract with J. Benton for undergrounding work along Queen Mary Highway, as well as a $5 million, two-year contract with Falcon USVI for security services at the Randolph Harley and Richmond power plants.
St. Croix Source
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