In Response to Recent Outages in St. Thomas, WAPA Said It's Troubleshooting Generation Unit 23; New Generator to Be Added to Plant by End of June

In response to a recent round of generation capacity challenges at the Randolph Harley Power Plant on St. Thomas, WAPA personnel have led a troubleshooting regimen toward resolving issues a the plant's largest generator, Unit 23, in an effort to resolve recent generation capacity challenges which led to outages Tuesday, the authority has announced. In addition, and to sure-up the power plant, the utility will soon add more capacity when Unit 27 returns to service later this month, WAPA said Thursday. WAPA explained that over the past few weeks, the Harley power plant has been dispatching all its capacity to satisfy electrical demand, with little to no reserve or back-up options. As a result, when a unit malfunctions or is taken out of service for repair and maintenance, there is not enough generation capacity to meet the electrical demand of the utility’s customers. Peak demand in the St. Thomas - St. John district is approximately 47 megawatts, the authority said. In recent weeks, ...