By the end of 2020, the Guyana Power and Light Inc. (GPL) should have a more reliable and optimised generation system that would be able to grow and evolve in a sustainable manner, Chief Executive Officer of the power company, Albert Gordon declared yesterday.
Gordon was at the time addressing a press conference at the company’s Duke Street head office.
“So as you’ve heard there are some deficiencies in the system but as we’ve been saying, there are widespread issues with the overall system. So the system generation level, transmission and distribution… we don’t have adequate backup… If something fails there’s no backup for it but it doesn’t just go down, it takes down other pieces of equipment with it and that is partially because of the protection scheme that normally manages how failures in a power system operate,” Gordon explained, while pointing out that it is now as it should be and that they will put putting backup systems in place that will provide alternate routes instead of their current outdated radial system.
He said that on the generation side of the system, they need new capacity to address the deficiencies and said that the Power Upgrade Utility Programme (PUUP), which is being funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the European Union, will add over 800 km of primary and secondary lines, which will exceed the targets.
In addition, they have already signed the contract for the Lot B stage of the programme to upgrade other infrastructure.
“The distribution system was falling apart in some areas and the project is really about rehabilitation and reconfiguration but there are still generation and transmission aspects and at some point we will be regularly breaking out these projects,” he explained.
Gordon noted that the frequency at which a customer should lose power due to a loss in generation should be 0.5% and is committing to giving customers a 99.5% level of reliability from the generation system, which translates into having a higher reserve margin.
“By the time we finish with all of these initiatives, and we are working with a five-year window (which closes in 2020)…for generation and a little longer for the transmission work. By then we should have a normal system that can evolve and grow in a reliable and sustainable manner and we are getting good support from the government in chasing down financing but it takes time,” he added.
At the distribution level, Gordon noted that long feeders result in high levels of losses and low voltage, but building new substations will assist in that. Furthermore, they are currently seeking funding and Gordon emphasised that they would need at least US$150 million to address the major deficits in the system to bring normalcy and to eliminate the widespread outages.
He also emphasised that they are looking to accelerate part of their plans and have been actively talking to financers and putting aside monies.
For several decades, successive governments have promised reliable electricity supply but power cuts persist amid a shaky transmission and distribution system.
Wales-Garden of Eden Substation
Divisional Director of Projects, Ryon Ross, explained that while the company’s short-term plans include building redundancies in the system by having more than one link between select substations, they are also looking to have a substation built at Wales on the West Bank of Demerara and right after, link it with a transmission line, either overhead or subsea, to the Garden of Eden Substation on the East Bank of Demerara, to create another loop that would better serve the system.
He added that the recently commissioned 5.5 MW power station at Canefield will be extended by a further 9.2 MW, and they are also looking at improving their reserve margin by a further 20 MW and are currently in discussions with some of the financial agencies for assistance in getting a 20 MW dual-fuel plant somewhere along the East Coast corridor.
“There is a larger plan to do with replacing older machines that have failed us sometimes. On the transmission side, our system is essentially one that is radial and substations are interconnected by single lines; if it fails then there is an outage. We currently have projects we have already secured funding to execute to create some redundant lines and build redundancy in our system,” he added.
He said that the current configuration of the system is not what he would term as “normal or best practice” and that some of the substations have been configured in a manner that is “suboptimal”, specifically at the Vreed-en-Hoop and Kingston locations, which they will be addressing.
The Vreed-en-Hoop and Kingston substations are the two most important generating units for the country’s grid, as they deliver 26 MW and 58 MW of power respectively, and their reconfigurations will be prioritised to be completed within the next two years.
Over the years, monies have been spent on repairing the transmission and distribution system of the grid, including a US$40 million loan from China that was meant to provide infrastructural updates.
However, Gordon explained that from what he learned, the project’s intention was to evolve the system to remove losses and move bulk power rather than improving reliability of the overall system.
“…About seven [substations] were created and so the 69 kV system was essentially extended from that…so the immediate impact of that was reduction in losses. But in doing that, it created the basic backbone of a transmission grid but did not create a network. It is serving one purpose in reducing losses, improving distribution voltage at all but that was the first step… it wasn’t a bad project but it was a first step and resulted in a radial transmission system and now we need to create some loops to create those redundancies,” Gordon said.
Ross also emphasised that the Infrastructural Development Project was commenced to move bulk power, as at the time, there were plans for hydropower at Amaila Falls that would’ve been delivered in bulk to the Sophia Power Station. However, at that time, GPL did not have such a capacity.
“In addition, we had long distribution feeders, so for people on the eastern end, low voltage was a serious concern…We’ve had two substations in that vicinity constructed as part of that project,” Ross said, while stating that the entire project could not be funded from the US$40 million and what was done was part of a wider plan.
“It was not the plan… For instance, we wanted to build and upgrade other substations. We got as far as Onverwagt but there were upgrades at Number 53, Canefield, and new substations outstanding for Williamsburg. There were other plans going as far as Parika,” he said.
Ross noted that they had a choice to either build a system and make it redundant and fully controllable but which would only be able to serve around Georgetown, or build a system without redundancies but expand it as far as possible so that customers in Berbice and the Western end of the grid could also have improved levels of service.
