Kalain Ho­sein

Re­porter

kalain.ho­sein@guardian.co.tt

T&TEC gen­er­al man­ag­er Curvis Fran­cois hopes cus­tomers will re­duce their elec­tric­i­ty load from Sat­ur­day night in­to Sun­day morn­ing when Trinidad’s largest pow­er gen­er­a­tion plant will be tem­porar­i­ly of­fline for crit­i­cal up­grade works.

“Any form of con­ser­va­tion that cus­tomers could prac­tice dur­ing that pe­ri­od would be good,” he said.

The shut­down is ex­pect­ed to take place be­tween 10 pm Sat­ur­day and 9 am Sun­day, a pe­ri­od with low elec­tric­i­ty load across Trinidad. Fran­cois hopes cus­tomers will re­duce their use of high-en­er­gy-con­sum­ing ap­pli­ances.

“The biggest use would be air con­di­tion­ing load, and we would hope that cus­tomers would prob­a­bly cut back, turn­ing it on at night and come off in the wee hours of the morn­ing,” he said

Al­lay­ing fears of a re­peat of the Feb­ru­ary 2022 black­out in which the pow­er grid ex­pe­ri­enced a cat­a­stroph­ic fail­ure pre­cip­i­tat­ed by a falling tree branch on a high-volt­age cir­cuit, Fran­cois said: “I’d like to say that there is a very low like­li­hood of a black­out oc­cur­ring or any kind of na­tion­wide black­out oc­cur­ring as a re­sult of the TGU shut­down.”

Trinidad Gen­er­a­tion Un­lim­it­ed (TGU) pro­duces ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50 per cent of Trinidad’s elec­tric­i­ty. When that plant is tak­en of­fline on Sat­ur­day night, pow­er from two oth­er in­de­pen­dent pow­er gen­er­a­tors, Trin­i­ty Pow­er and Pow­er­Gen, will make up the short­fall.

The T&TEC gen­er­al man­ag­er said both plants will be suf­fi­cient to cov­er the load, but if one of the units at ei­ther plant suf­fers an is­sue or is over­loaded, load shed­ding might oc­cur.

“If there is load shed­ding, a small per­cent­age of our sys­tem would be shut down. If we lose a unit, we have enough spin­ning re­serve to cov­er that, but if there is any­thing more than that, we can have load shed­ding tak­ing place, af­fect­ing just a few thou­sand cus­tomers for a short time. We don’t con­sid­er it a huge risk to the sit­u­a­tion,” he said.

Fran­cois added that T&TEC serves more than 500,000 cus­tomers. T&TEC cus­tomers in To­ba­go will not be af­fect­ed by the TGU shut­down this week­end.