AS part of its efforts to reduce the number of power outages, the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) has increased its maintenance exercises.

This is according to Divisional Director Bharat Harjohn, who made a presentation during a virtual Public Utilities Commission (PUC) public hearing on Tuesday.

Harjohn said that due to several maintenance exercises, the company, in the last year, was able to report a reduction in emergency power outages.

“As we increase our maintenance activity, improving the health of the network, you can see the effect of that. There was a reduction in emergency outage, and there’s also a reduction in trips,” Harjohn said.

He further explained that there are two types of outages being experienced by the network.

“So, we have outages for planned maintenance, and we have outages when there is an emergency. When there’s an emergency, for example, there’s a pool of fail for some reason, we’ll do some switching activity to isolate that to conduct maintenance or repair. We have generation shortfall voltage to generate districts; these are outages coming out from the substation or a transformer,” Harjohn said.

He noted that for 2021, the company had faced many adversities as it relates to providing quality service to consumers amidst the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and that while there was a series of material delays that resulted in the company missing some of its targets for the year, they were still able to push on during 2021.

“In 2020, we had the elections and ‘COVID’, so most of that work was pushed into 2021. And we had material delays that kind of put us on not meeting some of our targets,” Harjohn said.

He informed the PUC that as the year progresses, GPL will continue working to further optimise its frequency control, which is the heartbeat of its services.
“For 2022, we are actively working. Right now, we are working to optimise our frequency control system. We know that the frequency is the heartbeat of the system,” Harjohn said.