T&TEC said it ex­pects a full restora­tion of ser­vices around 1 am Thurs­day.

The fol­low­ing is a state­ment by T&TEC:

"T&TEC con­tin­ues to sup­port the ef­forts of its In­de­pen­dent Pow­er Pro­duc­ers (IPPs) to get pow­er back on­to the grid for dis­tri­b­u­tion to its cus­tomers, af­ter a fault de­vel­oped on the T&TEC sys­tem at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 12:50 p.m. to­day. The fault caused T&TEC’s two ma­jor Gand­hi Vil­lage/Union Es­tate 220 KV (220,000 Volts) lines to trip.

This re­sult­ed in sys­tem in­sta­bil­i­ty and caused all the gen­er­at­ing ma­chines op­er­at­ed by IPPs to trip, lead­ing to a loss of sup­ply to all cus­tomers in Trinidad. To­ba­go was un­af­fect­ed and con­tin­ued to be served from the Cove Pow­er Sta­tion. At ap­prox­i­mate­ly 1:30 p.m. the IPPs were di­rect­ed to restart their gen­er­a­tors.

Restart­ing the gen­er­a­tors from ze­ro is known as a black start, how­ev­er there were some un­fore­seen de­lays in com­plet­ing this process. Restora­tion of sup­ply com­menced at ap­prox­i­mate­ly 5:00 p.m. with cus­tomers in some parts of Pe­nal.

At this time all the IPPs have start­ed their gen­er­a­tors and most cus­tomers from Pe­nal to Mt Hope are back on sup­ply. Bar­ring un­fore­seen cir­cum­stances, we ex­pect to re­store sup­ply to the rest of the is­land (east, fur­ther north and west) by 1:00 a.m. We again apol­o­gise for the ex­tend­ed out­age and the ag­gra­vat­ed in­con­ve­nience caused.

T&TEC is mind­ful of its man­date to pro­vide cus­tomers with a safe and re­li­able sup­ply of elec­tric­i­ty and reaf­firms its com­mit­ment to do so. The Com­mis­sion will share fur­ther in­for­ma­tion on this in­ci­dent to­mor­row, when in­ter­nal as­sess­ments are more ad­vanced."