By John McPhaul
jpmcphaul@gmail.com
A total of 22,200 LUMA Energy customers were without service Tuesday afternoon due to a breakage at the Aguirre Power Plant in Salinas.
The incident occurred at 2 p.m. when Unit 2 of the Aguirre Power plant was forced out of service due to a problem with the water level protection system in the boiler.
“Technical personnel of the plant are attending the failure that occurred,” the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) said through its social networks.
PREPA added that the reserve units of Cambalache, Mayagüez, Daguao and Palo Seco were entering into service to mitigate the situation and restore electrical service to affected customers.
The Aguirre Power Plant is one of the main sources of electricity production in Puerto Rico. The interruption of its service affects a significant number of customers on the island. PREPA said it was working to fix the problem as soon as possible.
The outage came a day after more than 60,000 customers of LUMA Energy, the private consortium that operates PREPA’s transmission and distribution system, were left without energy service due to a breakage in the same boiler.
“Unit 2 of the Aguirre Power Plant was forced out of service at 6:02 p.m [Monday], causing a deficiency in the Generation System and service interruptions,” LUMA said on its social networks.
Technical staff of PREPA in Aguirre had the boiler running overnight and was looking for the pressure and temperature parameters to begin the taxiing of the turbine and return it to service. According to the LUMA Energy website, 28,157 customers were out of service, and the Carolina region had the greatest deficiency with over 17,000 customers lacking service.
According to the LUMA Energy website, some 60,169 customers remained without service. In the Arecibo region, some 16,829 customers were out, followed by Mayagüez with 13,306, Ponce with 10,989, Carolina with 5,245, Caguas with 5,228, San Juan with 4,433 and Bayamón with 16,289.
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