CHRISTIANSTED — The Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority offered explanations on Tuesday for recent outages in the territory, including an island-wide St. Croix outage on Friday that lasted for several hours.
That outage was initially caused by the severe storm that hit the island on Friday afternoon, according to a WAPA press release. A fault on the transformer initiated a protection scheme, which is designed to protect power systems by isolating the components under fault.
According to WAPA’s statement, personnel are working on an analysis to determine the cause of the outage and preventative steps for the future.
An early Sunday morning outage was caused by the activation of the Emergency Shutdown Protocol at the liquid petroleum gas terminal facility, which WAPA described in the statement as a safety mechanism meant to protect the Estate Richmond power plant. The reason for the protocol’s activation is also being investigated.
Several feeders briefly lost power later that morning at around 7 a.m. when the GT20 generating unit tripped because of poor power supply in the turbine control system, the Authority stated.
Heavy rains also caused a unit in the St. Thomas-St. John district to trip.
According to WAPA, the “existing electrical infrastructure across the territory has faced challenges as a result of aging components and deferred maintenance due to financial constraints. This has contributed to the frequency of equipment failures and service interruptions.”
The Authority stated that efforts to overcome those challenges include immediate repairs and replacement of damaged infrastructure; plans to upgrade and modernize the electrical grid through its VITOL acquisition, Wartsila project on St. Thomas and increased efficient generation units on St. Croix; and diversification of its energy portfolio through renewable wind and solar power.