The St. Thomas-St. John district was crippled by severe power outages Wednesday, with a handful of feeders, such as 6A and 8A, experiencing back-to-back rotations. On St. Thomas, outages began mid-morning and lasted until 11:35 p.m.., when V.I. Water and Power Authority officials confirmed Unit 23 was back online and all feeders had been restored.
Two feeders on St. Croix were also hit, with officials attributing the disruptions to vegetation impacting the lines because of Wednesday’s downpour, along with lightning strikes.
Frequent outages have plagued the territory for months, leading to an energy state of emergency declaration in April. The current disruptions come as WAPA commissions new fuel-efficient Wartsila Phase 2 generators, which required taking three legacy Wartsila Phase 1 units offline for LPG interconnection work, according to the authority’s Communications Director Shanell Petersen. WAPA expects this work to conclude by Friday, aiming to restore sufficient generating capacity. The new units will add 36 megawatts to the Randolph Harley Power Plant, she said.
In the meantime, Unit 15 and Unit 27 are the only operational units in the St. Thomas-St. John district, providing 30 megawatts — about half the customer demand. This shortfall has led to rotating power outages, Petersen said Wednesday night.
Unit 23, which generates around 30 megawatts, is offline for repairs, causing additional feeders to lose power. The legacy Wartsila units generally supply 21 megawatts, but increased summer demand and limited solar energy due to persistent cloud cover have worsened the situation, Petersen explained.
“The authority understands how challenging these outages have been for everyone, and we want to assure you that we are doing everything possible to restore stable power generation on St. Thomas and St. John,” Petersen said. “We remain cautiously optimistic that these outages related to the commissioning of the LPG system will not extend beyond this Friday. However, we acknowledge that there continues to exist the possibility of mechanical failure of our older units until they can be taken offline for long overdue maintenance.”
WAPA is working with federal partners to explore temporary generation solutions, but additional funding for relief has not yet been approved, she added.
