Apr 22 - Government Statement On Power Station Explosion And Fire: New Engines To Be Delivered This Week
The Government wishes to thank the emergency services and the technical staff of Gibelec for their excellent work at the Waterport power station on Sunday afternoon. The response was led by the Gibraltar Electricity Authority, the Royal Gibraltar Police and the City Fire Brigade, who were ably assisted by the Defence Fire Service.
The Government is pleased to confirm that there were no injuries during the incident itself or during the City Fire Brigade's successful efforts to extinguish the fire.
During the incident, all power supplies to Gibraltar were deliberately switched off by the GEA to allow Fire Brigade personnel to move safely around the generating station and to protect the infrastructure of the distribution network.
The source of the fire was an elderly engine which should have been decommissioned years ago. Sunday's incident was followed by a further outage on Monday when turbines tripped in the same power station and it took Gibelec engineers around an hour to restore power to all consumers.
The Government is well aware of the frailty of Gibraltar's old power supply and has developed both short and long-term strategies to meet the Rock's needs.
In the short term, the Government has already arranged for additional generating capacity to be added to the network. Five turbines which provide 25 Mega Watts of installed power are already running reliably from the North Western end of the North Mole. In addition, sixteen Caterpillar XQ2000 diesel engines, due to arrive on the Rock within the next 7 days, had already been contracted to relieve the old generators at Waterport. These will be on-line within weeks and will provide 20 MWe of continuous power plus 2.8 MWe standby - enough power to guarantee all the Rock's power supplies for the next two years even in periods of high demand.
The Government expects to announce the result of the tender process for the new gas-fuelled power station in the next 30 days. This is the result of the new power station being one of the principal priorities for the Government since taking over in December 2011. This should result in a completely new power station being in operation within 18 to 24 months. Gas fuelled power stations are cheaper to run and less polluting than their diesel fuelled equivalents.
The new power distribution network - which is already being worked on by the GEA - will have system redundancy so that, in the event of an incident similar to Sunday's, power will continue to be supplied to the remainder of the network while the immediate area of the fault is repaired.
As is usual after a major incident, the Government will now seek to learn lessons from the fire at the power station and it will review the relevant contingency plans. This review will invite contributions from Gibraltar's telecommunications providers, the gaming industry, broadcasters and the emergency services.
During the incident, acting Chief Minister, Gilbert Licudi and Minister for Utilities and Civil Contingencies, Steven Linares, were in attendance at Waterport Power Station with GEA Chief Executive Manolo Alecio and Chief Engineer Michael Caetano.
Chief Minister, Fabian Picardo, said: "I want to thank the GEA professionals, the RGP, the City Fire Brigade and their colleagues at the Defence Fire Service for their excellent response on Sunday. The absence of casualties is a testament to their professionalism. The work on the new distribution network (or the grid) has already started and is designed to avoid the need to cut-off power in such incidents in the future. The new power station will be a reality in the next 18 to 24 months. It will be a state of the art facility with lower pollution levels. Until then we will have more than enough power as a result of having brought in the 25MW of turbine power and the sixteen additional engines we had contracted to arrive in Gibraltar this week which will provide an additional 20MW. These will also be located at the North Western corner of the North Mole. What I am most concerned about is the apparent failure of additional services, such as parts of the telecommunications infrastructure. I am not satisfied that these worked as we would have expected that they should and I am going to ensure these processes are reviewed immediately. Six hours without power and a further power cut on Monday is unacceptable and we must ensure our new systems are tested to avoid such eventualities in the future."
