Over the past year, with a majority of the Marshalls Energy Company’s seven power plant engines out of commission — either broken or undergoing major maintenance — Majuro residents have experienced numerous power outages.
But Marshalls Energy Company general manager David Paul said Wednesday the re-commissioning of engine “number six” gets the power company over a key hurdle to delivering consistent power supply to its customers.
Engine number six, a Deutz, broke down February last year in large part because it was thousands of hours overdue for major maintenance. The year-long overhaul involved bringing in an Australian firm to re-commission the engine that has a maximum output of 6.4 megawatts.
With number six engine fixed and back in action, the MEC power plant can supply all of Majuro’s power needs with just two engines, said Paul. MEC has also returned a smaller 2.5 megawatt Caterpillar engine to service earlier this month. This allows MEC to pull the other 6.5 megawatt engine — “number seven” — off line for major maintenance.
Number seven is in urgent need of overhaul, but has been running almost non-stop for the past year and has now been run for more than 63,000 hours without overhaul, Paul said.
The smaller engines in the power plant have more than 122,000 hours each, showing their age and need for overhauls in the near future, Paul said.
The fact that number six engine is fixed is not just good news for other engines needing to be fixed, but will translate into large cost savings for MEC, Paul said. The overhaul means that number six will run more fuel efficiently, burning less diesel. He anticipates that this will result in a daily reduction by as much as 2,000 to 3,000 gallons of diesel use , which translates into a savings in the millions of dollars annually.
“We can use the savings for investment needed to fix engines at the power plant,” he said.
Majuro’s peak power demand is now about eight megawatts, but drops as low as 5.8 megawatts when it is raining and people turn off air conditioners.
“We could run the whole island on number six engine at those times,” Paul said.
Besides the need for a major overhaul of number seven engine, “our next big challenge is fixing the distribution system,” Paul said.
