Electricity Instability Will Persist Across the Country Temporarily

According to Moreno, since Monday night there have been numerous interruptions to electricity supply across the country because of high demand and inadequate supply. B.E.L. is urging customers to curtail their use of power. He noted that with the commissioning of the upgraded feeder at Mile Eight, power supply should be back to near normal this weekend. But until then, there will be numerous inconsistencies in the power supply.

 

Jose Moreno, General Manager, Distribution Services B.E.L.

“This evening is CFE curtails us again we will have to rotate some outages, we will have to affect some feeders given that the demand today is high as it was yesterday. Normally it happens at the tie that CFE goes through its peak. That happens between seven to ten o’clock at night. But there is light at the end of the tunnel, and we are doing an upgrade of the gas turbine at mile eight. With that upgrade we should be getting ten additional megawatts to the twenty that the unit was rated earlier. That unit is supposed to start commissioning by this weekend. We expect to have that unit online by early next week. The process of restoring the system is kind of complex. We have to make sure we match generation to the demand we have. Sometimes the generating units become unstable when you add new load. Some of them will go off, their protection takes them off because of frequency or voltage and it cascades the whole system and that is what happened this morning.”