On Sunday 2016 April 17th at 6:59 pm, the Jamaican electric power system experienced a major system failure which separated the power grid into two sub-systems namely; corporate and rural area sub-systems. The rural area sub-system eventually suffered a total blackout, while the corporate area survived after intermittently losing some of its customers.
Earlier in the day two (2) 69 kV transmission lines; Hunts Bay – Port Authority of Jamaica (PAJ) and Hunts Bay – Duhaney were taken out of service to facilitate road works being undertaken by the National Works Agency (NWA). These two (2) lines emanated from the Hunts Bay power station in the corporate area, the largest load centre on the island.
A total of 456 MW of generation was lost, affecting approximately 547,734 customers. Most customers were progressively restored within three (3) hours and full restoration of all customers was completed by 10:49 pm the same night.
The system operator Jamaica Public Service Company Limited (JPS), in keeping with section 45 (12) and (13) of the Electricity Act, 2015 (the Act) submitted to the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) an outage investigation report of the incident entitled ‘Major System Failure Technical Report’, 2016 April 17. This report provided an overview of the electric power system, the status of key elements of the system, conditions on the electric system that existed prior to the outage,
events during the outage and sought to explain how and why the outage occurred. The measures and procedures to restore the system to normal operations were also described. The report concluded with a series of recommendations for actions that can and should be taken by JPS to prevent or minimize such occurrences in the future.
