The Barbados Light & Power (BL&P) has finally pinpointed breaker failure as the cause of January’s islandwide blackout that affected the swearing in of the island’s Governor General Dame Sandra Mason.
And after determining the cause of the power outage, Barbados Light & Power (BL&P) managing director Roger Blackman has revealed the company is moving to ensure it doesn’t occur again.
During a press conference yesterday at the utility company’s headquarters in Garrison Hill, St Michael, Blackman said the blackout was caused by breaker failure in the Seawell generating substation.
Their investigations found the issue was isolated to an internal fault at a breaker which damaged neighbouring equipment when it failed.
Admitting that one fault should not bring the whole system down, Blackman said the BL&P had protected systems which usually would prevent one issue causing the entire network problems.
However, Blackman said faults occurring near a generating station tended to have a more severe impact on the network and while the protection measures worked well, he said severity of the fault created the cascading effect.
“. . . In the investigations we have done, we have found two areas of improvements we can make, and that would mitigate against those types of faults in the future causing an islandwide outage,” Blackman added.
He said the Emera-owned company was set to improve their system’s ability to “ride through” faults as one of the stations at the Spring Garden power plant did not handle the January 8 failure as expected.
Additionally, Blackman said the BL&P was enhancing the system’s under frequency scheme, allowing it to handle any imbalances or losses in power generation.
Minutes before Dame Sandra was sworn into office on January 8 at 4 p.m., the country suffered a power outage which left the majority of the island in darkness well into the night.
Blackman said that after doing some repairs, the Seawell substation was now operating at 75 per cent capacity with the other 25 per cent expected to be rectified within the next two months. (AD)