Wewak’s new generator seen as slower, but more economical

EAST Sepik Governor Allan Bird says the decision to get a slower generator to support power supply in the province was made on a recommendation.
Bird said the East Sepik administration had held talks with the new PNG Power Ltd manager in the province and he had recommended that they buy a medium-speed generator.
He said the generators that PNG Power had were all high-speed.
“The one we are getting runs on about 800 revolutions per minute, so it runs a lot slower which means it uses about 20 per cent less fuel,” Bird said.
He highlighted that the machine in question was a 3.5 megawatt machine, which was a big machine.
Bird said it would provide baseload for the province.
He said the slower generator was more reliable as the issues with the high-speed machine was that if a tree branch fell on a power line, there would be feedback to the generator and it would drop out the whole system.
However, with the new machine, that would not be the case because it would stabilise the power and balance it out.
Bird said the new generator was bought from Hyundai.
He explained that they had to wait for over a year for it to be delivered as the type of generator was not available in store and had to be built on order.
Bird said he was pleased that the generator was finally here but they now faced the problem of fuel supply.
He said PNG Power could not buy the fuel that they would need which meant the provincial government would have to buy the fuel.
“It’s not the provincial government’s role to provide power, however, it’s an essential service,” Bird said.
“So we bought the generator because it would be cheaper to operate and will ease with our power problems.”
He said the provincial government would consider buying another generator if the need arose.