The Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) on Sunday released a statement on what caused many parts of the country — from Demerara to Berbice — to lose electricity Saturday night.
At 9:54 p.m., GPL posted a public advisory on its official Facebook page, stating that it is experiencing a “total shutdown”.
This evoked an immediate flow of angry responses from its customers.
GPL said power was full restored at 0:33 hours but some people on social media have reported receiving power much later.
Below is the full statement from the company:
At approximately 22:45 hrs last evening, one of our larger generating units (8.7 Megawatts) at the Vreed-en-Hoop (VEH) Power Plant developed a lube oil leak on a turbocharger and had to be taken offline on an emergency basis as there was a high risk of a fire.
An initial analysis suggests the rapid off-loading of the 8.7MW unit resulted in a significant frequency decline. Despite the intervention of other generators and our under-frequency load-shedding scheme, the system collapsed.
Remedial efforts to restore power commenced immediately. At approximately 22:57 hrs the first circuit in Georgetown was repowered, with incremental restoration continuing in Georgetown and lower East Coast. All areas were repowered at approximately 00:33 hrs.
Data gathering and analysis continues today to identify the sequence of events as captured by our SCADA system.
Despite these challenges, our company remains committed to improving the reliability of service to our customers.
