City’s power supply restored

By HELEN TARAWA
POWER supply in Port Moresby and parts of Central was restored after a six-hour outage yesterday following a fault at the Waigani sub-station, an official says.
PNG Power acting chief executive officer Douglas Mageo told The National that the power outage was caused by the insulator that snapped on a tower at Burns Peak.
Mageo said their operations teams restored power at about 5pm.
State Enterprise Minister Sasindran Muthuvel said the cause of the outages was a combination of technical factors from ageing infrastructure to new equipment and increased loads.
He said the unscheduled outages around Port Moresby were caused by failures at various substations supplying the grid.
“We have new supplies of energy and its now causing issues across our ageing infrastructure which we are in the process of replacing,” Muthuvel said.
“We also experienced a rare transmission line fault at Rouna.
“The Port Moresby grid is going through a transformation of increased load demand and new generation plant on the system and independent power producers .
“PNG Power continues to work with its generation partners on these new loads and supplies,” Muthuvel said.
He said the Port Moresby and Ramu power grids needed to be maintained as little work had been done on them in the past 10 years.
Ialibu-Pangia MP Peter O’Neill said during his term as prime minister blackouts were stopped through maintenance and improved governance and accountability.
O’Neill said the blackouts caused serious problems for the people and businesses,
He said the blackouts undermined medical and healthcare service delivery and made it difficult for families to refrigerate food.