By Kimberly Ramkhalawan
February 18, 2022
Trinidad spend most of Wednesday in the dark, as the entire island experienced a total blackout starting a little after lunch. Traffic lights stopped working, while most companies were forced to shut down business as apart from electricity supply gone, so were its telephone and internet services as well as water supply in some areas as resulting in a dip in pressure flow to faucets.
While Tobago was spared the brunt of blackout, the reasoning behind the electrical outage is said to have been brought on by a fault on the 220 kv transmission line that takes power from the TGU power plant in Union Industrial Estate in La Brea to the Ghandi Village sub station, which caused the TGU power plant to trip.
General Manager for the sole electricity provider on the island, Trinidad and Tobago Electricity Commission (T&TEC), Kelvin Ramsook, described it as a fault occurring on two major circuits in the Rousillac area yesterday. While the island has other power plants, TGU remains the largest producer. It is said when this happened, both Powergen plants located in Penal, South Trinidad and the other on the Point Lisas Industrial Estate in Central Trinidad along with the Trinity power plant, the offset in the load could not be handled, causing the nationwide blackout.
Updates coming in from TTEC’s Corporate Communication’s Manager, Anabelle Brasnell informed the nation that its Independent Power Producers (IPPs) were having issues restarting the generators to allow a gradual restoration of supply. However, the initial time for restart after the outage was put at approximately 2-3 hours. This quickly resulted in a doubling up of the time to six hours since power first went. Admitting that it had turned into a lengthy process, Brasnell said it had proven to be challenging as all turbines were starting from a total dead state resulting in a longer start up time, extending to closer to midnight for most of the Trinidad before power was restored.
The last time Trinidad experienced such an outage occurred on Good Friday in 2013, when the country experienced a total blackout during the wee hours of the morning as a result of a disruption of natural gas supply and that resulted in the other power plants all going down.
The recent power failure has prompted a renewed call for hydro and solar power systems to be put in place on the grid, allowing for a more diversified power source.