Sept 8th, 2003

Blackout Shrouds Belize

Except for Caye Caulker and Punta Gorda the country of Belize experienced an electrical blackout from 2:41 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. today. The Belize blackout took place approximately two weeks after the August 14th blackout in the US. At 4:11, Thursday afternoon the entire northeast of the States lost power and major metropolitan areas like New York City and Detroit screeched to a silent standstill. The States' blackout was caused by overloaded generators breaking down and likewise the Belize blackout was caused by generation problems in Mexico.

Neville Samuels, the Corporate Communications Manager of Belize Electricity Limited (BEL), said the blackout was because Belize lost its Mexican supply of electricity.

Due to bad weather at Campeche and Merida the Mexican company, Comission Federal de Electricidad (C.F.E.), that helps to supply Belize with electricity had to shed some of its load, said Samuels.

After Belize lost its supply of electricity from Mexico the entire national grid collapsed. BEL had to look internally for help but it had technical difficulties getting its gas turbine unit to work. The unit is located at mile 8 on the Western highway. It is used for back-up and for peaking purposes.

After several hours BEL managed to get the gas turbine unit going and electricity in most of Belize was restored. The unit supplies 20 mega watts. The restoration took so long because of three interrelated snafus. According to Derek Davis, V.P., Energy Supply, B.E.L. “The first problem was related to black-starting with the gas turbine. As you know, this unit was designed, this was one of the purposes it was designed for, but it’s one of the things you cannot test so easily because it only happens when the system goes dead. So the point is, when we tried to do it, it didn’t work. We had technical problems, the breaker didn’t close, and so we had to use other options to get it going.”

Davis explained, “Black starting” as the method used to get a dead system going again. He said if you don’t have power you need to use auxiliaries sources like electric motors to kick-start the generators. BEL had to find some small diesel unit that was still working to power up the bigger generator and get major power to the grid.

When asked by the media why the new Mile 8 Plant took several hours to get going Davis said, “What fell down on us was that the breaker itself, there is some wiring problem on the breaker that it did not close on to the dead bus. It could not sense that the bus was dead and closed.” And the last problem Davis cited in getting the juice flowing again was that the early hour, 3 am, the break down occurred made it difficult getting workers to recharge the system. He stated, “This was three in the morning and we had to find people to get to the site. And after that, we had to find people and get them to the Belize City plant. We then had to use the diesel generators in Belize City to start up the system and get power to mile eight, so we could synchronize, as opposed to starting on a black dead system.”

According to Samuels the word received from Comission Federal de Electricidad was that their plant should be fixed by 4 p.m. today. But for the moment the Mexican company can supply Belize with 6 mega watts, said Samuels.

Belize usually gets 25 mega watts from Mexico.

Samuels said the Mollejon plant is only supplying 5 mega watts because the water is at a low level.

Samuels further stated that if the Mexican supply is not restored by tomorrow, Wednesday, September 3, BEL will have scheduled outages in rotation and will try to keep areas that provide essential services from being affected.