| Residents and the business community of Corriverton, Skeldon and much of the Upper Corentyne were, up to press time yesterday without electricity, since early morning as lengthy power outages continued to affect the heavily-populated border town. That was a continuation of a blackout all day on Friday in the town.This comes in the wake of a press release issued yesterday by the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) in response to a Kaieteur News article in Saturday’s edition captioned: ‘Skeldon Co – Gen plant out of operation,DJ LeMahieu Rockies Jersey, blackout hit Skeldon’.The press release stated that the KN article was “plainly wrong”, and that “The fact of the matter is that the Skeldon Co-Gen plant supplies constantly on an hourly basis throughout the day an average of 5.5MW to 6.0 MW to the Berbice grid. At the moment power is being generated by two of the three Wartsila plants and the factory turbine generator.“The generating capacity of these two Wartsila sets is 2.5 MW each. During the grinding operation power is also supplied to the grid from the factory turbine generator at about 3.0 MWh, using bagasse fuel and the factory has been consistently crushing canes for the past 12 weeks”.The release stated,Cheap NFL Jerseys Supply, too, that “repair is being done to the third Wartsila set,Jerseys NFL Wholesale, the largest of the three, with a generating capacity of 5 MW, and which has been out of operation for the past 18 months, due to an electrical failure. The repair to this set is expected to be in operation for the coming Christmas season.”However, several business entities and even the President of the Upper Corentyne Chamber of Commerce (UCCCI), said that the Upper Corentyne area continues to suffer immensely from power outages, and even hinted that the situation is getting worse.The Upper Corentnye area is supplied with power from the Co Generation factory located in the Skeldon Sugar Factory building. GuySuCo has said that the co- gen plant is in full operation on a daily basis, however the increased occurrence of blackouts have again brought their assumptions into question.President of UCCCI, Mr. Krishnand Jaichand was furious. “This thing is terrible, terrible right now! It’s been nine hours right now I am running a generator. Mr. [Ayube] Bacchus (GPL Area Manager) said it was a transmission line [problem] and I understand some generator [at Skeldon] is giving problems”.Daily blackoutsJaichand added, “It’s been affecting us… not only the businesses, but the general public,cheap nfl jerseys online, affecting the livelihood of people especially tourism,Chicago Cubs Jerseys, hotels, etc. I am totally disappointed in GPL, we even had a press release only last month and it’s frustrating for people on the Upper Corentyne— It’s terrible!”The Chamber president added that there were sporadic outages on Friday evening.Businessman Vishnu Doerga of Number 78 Village, Corriverton now has additional costs incurred due to running a stand by generator whenever there is an outage. He was running a generator yesterday.“For me,Wholesale NFL Jerseys, it would be additional cost having to run power generation equipment to be able to continue serving our customers. I would personally urge GPL to rectify the situation as early as possible and to move towards implementing redundancy measures so as to avoid such situations in the future”.GPL Chief Executive Officer Bharrat Dindyal and GPL’S Technical Director visited the Skeldon Co- Gen Plant two Fridays ago and inspected the equipment there. He also met with the UCCCI Vice- President and some other business people from the area.He noted that he was “very disheartened about the situation and hopefully GPL or GuySuCo—whoever is at fault can work can work harder than they are working now about this”. |
