Blackouts
The National, Tuesday September 8th, 2015
By HELEN TARAWA
PNG Power Ltd is fast-tracking additional machines to stabilise the power supply in Port Moresby after the PNG LNG power plant went off line yesterday.
PPL managing director John Mangos told The National that the PPL team reworked the process to ensure the supply was stable and met the city’s demand.
PPL said supply in Port Moresby will be on load shedding for an indefinite period due to a shortfall in generation capacity.
“With the current El Nino weather pattern, water level at Sirinumu has gone down now to 45 per cent of full spill level,” it said in a statement.
Mangos said the ExxonMobil power plant went off at mid-morning yesterday due to equipment issues resulting in the power outage.
There were blackouts on Saturday, Sunday and yesterday.
The PNG LNG power plant was launched by Prime Minister Peter O’Neill in July to supply 25 megawatts to Port Moresby.
PPL board chairman Larry Andagali then promised there would be no outages in Port Moresby, particularly during the Pacific Games in July.
The gas-fired power supply was agreed to by the Government and the PNG LNG in January this year to add supply to Port Moresby to meet demands.
“We would like to apologise for all the inconvenience caused, especially during the time of the Pacific Islands Forum,” Mangos said.
“PPL is moving away from being reliant on hydro due to the lack of water and so we are using our large diesel and gas plants more to meet the demand. We are bringing on line more machines to meet the demand for this week. As we made the changes, unfortunately the system lost stability, causing the blackout.
“The team has reworked the processes (yesterday) so they are not just looking at meeting demand but ensuring the supply is stable and reliable which means a different mix of machines, so this situation becomes a lot less likely.
“We started to recover from the issue but unfortunately the ExxonMobil plant has gone off air due to equipment issues so we are now fast-tracking additional machines on top of what we put in place last week.”