The islandwide blackout began at 7:28 a.m. and lasted through past 9 a.m.
CUC Executive Director Tony Muna said they are revisiting their protocol to avoid a similar situation.
“[Yesterday] morning, what essentially happened, the operator basically took our speedy reserve off line at a critical moment when he was trying to establish what we call stability in our frequency — the 60 hertz per second cycle,” Muna said during the governor’s weekly news conference.
“In establishing that, it took a generator off line at a point where demand was also increasing at about 7:28 [yesterday] morning. So with that happening, Power Plant 4 went down, taking out Aggreko and then Power Plant 1,” he added.
The CUC chief said Saipan’s current electricity demand peaks at 39 megawatts, except during weekends.
“But even on weekends our load is increasing. As it stands, the way the operational protocol works, when we are peaking at 37 megawatts, we’re using essentially about 42,000 gallons per day of fuel over Power Plant 1 and about 16,000 gallons at Power Plant 4,” he said
“With the increase in load…fuel consumption has not increased more than 100 gallons or 200 gallons per day,” he added.
Wallon Young, CUC’s deputy director for utilities power rehabilitation, said “demand exceeded online generation” yesterday morning.
He said the operator assumed that there were too many engines online so precautionary measures were taken that resulted on a blackout.
Muna said the incident prompted CUC to revisit its operational protocol.
“As much as we would like to save or maximize on our fuel savings, it looks like we may need to revisit to what extent we have a speedy reserve available to us at any given time,” he said.
Saipan experienced regular power outages daily from 2005 through Sept. 2008 due to either lack of fuel supply or inability to produce enough electricity because of the poor condition of CUC’s power engines.
The rotating blackouts stopped after the 15-megawatt containerized generators of Aggreko were rented late last year for over $500,000 a month.
