At about 5:45 pm on Saturday 2016 August 27, a fault on the Jamaica Public Service Company Limited’s (JPS’) 69 kV Transmission System between the Port Authority of Jamaica (PAJ) and Hunts Bay substations resulted in unstable voltage and frequency conditions. These unstable conditions in turn precipitated the tripping of all generating units online and consequently a total System failure in approximately 15 seconds after the initiation of the fault.
This was the second occasion in 2016 in which the electricity System experienced a major failure. The first of these two incidents occurred on 2016 April 17. The incident resulted in the partial shutdown of the electricity System during which, 485.03 MW of load was disconnected from the System causing customers island-wide to experience loss of electricity supply for extended periods.
Following the 2016 August 27 System failure, the OUR, pursuant to its powers under the Office of Utilities Regulation Act and the Electricity Act, 2015 (EA), decided to formally investigate the circumstances salient to the incident and to undertake analyses similar to those conducted for previous outages. As such, the OUR established a Review Team, comprising Power System experts and OUR personnel, to conduct the investigation.
In executing the investigation, the Review Team carried out a comprehensive review and evaluation of the information and data submitted by JPS in relation to the subject outage as well as reports and recommendations associated with previous major System outage that occurred in Jamaica.
The evaluation and analyses conducted by the Review Team provided the basis for the resulting Conclusions and Recommendations.
