The St. Vincent Electricity Services (VINLEC) says its
investigations have revealed that last week Thursday’s power
the outage was triggered by a series of events which started at 11:59
am.
VINLEC says following the routine maintenance of one of their
two 15 MVA transformers at the Lowmans Bay Power Station,
the work teams executed a standard procedure to return the
transformer to service.
However, in executing this procedure that has been in place for
last 12 years, the system experienced a current inrush that
was notably higher than previously encountered or anticipated.
This caused a partial collapse of the system which accounted for
approximately 75 percent of VINLEC’s customers.
VINLEC says the process of restoring power to customers did
not progress as smoothly as planned and this resulted in an
entire system outage at 12:42 pm.
It adds that immediately thereafter, their Technical teams began
work to restore the system in phases.