CUC black out seizes up George Town
Caribbean Utilities Company
(CNS): Offices, local business, retailers, the courts, government departments, schools and homes across George Town and large parts of Grand Cayman were hit by a more than four-hour power blackout Tuesday — the second one in just a week. The outage led to early closing for schools and many businesses without generators in and around the capital. CUC officials described the problem as a fault in the “generation facility”, and when that fault was detected, the generator automatically shut down at around 10:50am.
CUC power was returned to all customers just before 3:30pm after sporadic outages continued across various parts of the island throughout the afternoon.
Apologising to customers, a CUC spokesperson said,”The fault caused the system to safely shut down as it is designed to do, resulting in a loss of power. CUC’s engineers have worked throughout the day to restore the system and bring the power back up in a safe manner.”
The power firm has not stated what the fault was or why there was no back-up system that could mitigated the problem. Last week a pole fire in the industrial area of George Town caused a two-hour outage across various parts of the capital, impacting almost 1,800 customers. However, Tuesday’s power cut lasted for more than twice as long and the power provider has not yet indicated the number of customers who were impacted by what was close to an island-wide blackout.
Category: Local News
This outrage is an outage!
The Airport should have back up power.matter of fact,any big business,should have some sort of back up,if even to run some of thier main equipment.After Ivan we should all have some back up plan.
The lack of backup power by most businesses speaks to CUC’s reliability over the years.
In most other countries, when the power goes out, it doesn’t even warrant media minute-by-minute coverage and most people don’t even call the utility, they just wait until it comes back on… because it’s more frequent.
When our power goes, the media is all over it, blow-by-blow and I’m pretty sure that CUC’s switchboard is hot.
Love em or hate em, their reliability stats are very high in the region.
For the small mortgage we have to pay every month to CUC, it had better damn well be reliable.
For goodness sake give CUC a break. You may not like their charges but by and large it operates very well and certainly loads better than many other jurisdictions I have lived in. Problems arise, they sorted it. End of!
I bet those other jurisdictions rates aren’t nearly as high as ours. I think it’s fair to expect our lights to stay on for what we pay.
They already have a break and have had it for years. It’s called a licence to print money. Until their monopoly is broken they deserve every bit of negative commentary written in this forum.
All the more reason to put solar panels on every flat surface on this island.
Reality: Solar power on that scale requires enormous and expensive grid-leveling batteries and less efficient and thicker gauge circuitry to stabilize the network – this raises costs for everyone. If there are 1000s of households delivering variable amounts PV power back into the sensitive circuitry of the grid at the wrong time of day, we would have exploding transformers, fires, and more district blackouts, probably when people really need the power most, ie. when households are at occupied at night for cooking, a/c, washing etc. Without reliable storage and grid balancing, night time consumption would still need to be powered from traditional diesel-fired generation. The weak link in the solar power chain is battery technology to store that power. HECO in Hawaii have blocked PV connection to whole districts because of the grid complexities of managing the surplus daytime generation. Those customers are now paying hundreds per month to amortize their un-used solar panel arrays they had prematurely acquired, plus their hundreds per month regular diesel-fired HECO power bills from normal nighttime consumption! Total bummer dude.
Ever heard of company called Tesla? They make electric cars and they have also come out with new battery technology that will change the way we store energy. Your statement “when households are occupied at night for cooking, a/c, washing etc. Without reliable storage and grid balancing, night time consumption would still need to be powered from traditional diesel-fired generation.” would have been completely true 5 years ago. At the rate technology is moving to make renewable energy more efficient, reliable and affordable pretty soon everyone can save their weekend drinking money to at least power a major appliance in their home with renewable energy.
Where is this battery? Where can we buy them? It doesn’t exist yet, and that’s the point.
So says the CUC stooge.
A you dat Arden?
Just part of our transition into a third world nation. Soon CUC will have a quaint term for it
Did the Airport Immigration get affected? Would it have been even slower coming through than normal?