Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

You may file a claim for com­pen­sa­tion from the Trinidad and To­ba­go Elec­tric­i­ty Com­mis­sion (T&TEC) as a re­sult of Wednes­day’s ex­tend­ed pow­er out­age.

If you get com­pen­sat­ed how­ev­er is an­oth­er mat­ter.

An in­ves­ti­ga­tion by a Cab­i­net ap­point­ed body will first have to be com­plet­ed in­to the mat­ter to de­ter­mine what ex­act­ly went wrong.

Ac­cord­ing to the Reg­u­lat­ed In­dus­tries Com­mis­sion (RIC) Guar­an­teed Elec­tric­i­ty Stan­dards 1:

“T&TEC is re­quired to re­store sup­ply af­ter an un­planned out­age on the dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem with­in ten hours.”

In­de­pen­dent Pow­er Pro­duc­er (IPP) Trinidad Gen­er­a­tion Un­lim­it­ed (TGU) in a re­lease stat­ed ex­pe­ri­enced a to­tal loss of fa­cil­i­ty pow­er at 12.52 p.m on its plant on Wednes­day “due to a fault on the T&TEC 220KV Gand­hi Vil­lage sub­sta­tion.”

This fault caused all gen­er­at­ing ma­chines at TGU to trip and even­tu­al­ly lead to a loss of its pow­er sup­ply to T&TEC.

All oth­er IPPs sub­se­quent­ly lost fa­cil­i­ty gen­er­a­tion lead­ing to a to­tal black­out across Trinidad which even­tu­al­ly end­ed just un­der 13 hours lat­er.

To­ba­go re­mained un­af­fect­ed by the is­sue.

The RIC stat­ed that if T&TEC fails to re­store pow­er af­ter ten hours res­i­den­tial cus­tomers are el­i­gi­ble for $60 com­pen­sa­tion while non-res­i­den­tial cus­tomers are to be paid $600.

As it stands now in or­der to even be con­sid­ered for this com­pen­sa­tion you have to file a claim.

“Cus­tomers are re­quired to file a claim with T&TEC for rel­e­vant com­pen­sa­tion. When new sys­tems are ful­ly im­ple­ment­ed, breach­es of this stan­dard will be au­to­mat­i­cal­ly de­ter­mined and cus­tomers will no longer be re­quired to file a claim,” the RIC stat­ed.

Apart from this, T&TEC al­so has Dam­aged Ap­pli­ance Claims for cus­tomers who be­lieve they may have suf­fered loss be­cause of the black­out and the even­tu­al re­turn of the elec­tric­i­ty.

“It is T&TEC’s pol­i­cy to prompt­ly and fair­ly re­spond to cus­tomers’ claims. It may take some time, be­cause we of­ten need to re­view records, con­sult ex­perts and speak with rel­e­vant par­ties,” T&TEC stat­ed.

“When our in­ves­ti­ga­tion is com­plete and you have sent in the claim form to­geth­er with the re­quired doc­u­ments, an ad­juster and /or T&TEC will con­tact you if it is de­ter­mined that T&TEC is li­able. If how­ev­er through these in­ves­ti­ga­tions it is de­ter­mined that your claim fall out­side that realm of T&TEC’s re­spon­si­bil­i­ty you would re­ceive a let­ter out­lin­ing the de­ci­sion,” T&TEC stat­ed.

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