Ke­jan Haynes

T&TEC will com­mis­sion the new Union/Gand­hi 220 kV dou­ble cir­cuit tow­er line on Tues­day. A state­ment from the Com­mis­sion says the cir­cuit will serve as a sec­ondary back­up to take elec­tric­i­ty from Trinidad Gen­er­a­tion Un­lim­it­ed (TGU) in La Brea, to T&TEC’s trans­mis­sion sub­sta­tion in Gand­hi Vil­lage, "from where it will be dis­trib­uted across the coun­try. "

Last year res­i­dents filed an in­junc­tion to stop the con­struc­tion since the line is pass­ing through pri­vate prop­er­ties in Siparia Old Road, Fyz­abad. How­ev­er T&TEC main­tained con­struc­tion of the cir­cuit was vi­tal.

“The cir­cuit will re­duce the like­li­hood of na­tion­wide out­ages. On com­ple­tion, the Com­mis­sion will be able to trans­fer pow­er to the new cir­cuit to con­duct out­stand­ing main­te­nance work on the ex­ist­ing cir­cuit which is over 10 years old and, in its cur­rent con­fig­u­ra­tion, can­not be tak­en out of ser­vice for any sig­nif­i­cant pe­ri­od of time to al­low pre­ven­ta­tive main­te­nance,” the Com­mis­sion said at the time.

In Au­gust 2022, the 220-kilo­volt (kV) trans­mis­sion tow­er along the Union Es­tate-Gand­hi Vil­lage par­tial­ly col­lapsed be­cause of a land­slide, tak­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 30% of cus­tomers across Trinidad of­fline.

Part of the line was al­so dam­aged by a falling tree in Feb­ru­ary 2022, caus­ing the ma­jor na­tion­wide block­out which kept the coun­try in dark­ness for al­most 12 hours.

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