Rolling Blackouts on St. Thomas and St. John to End Friday, Karl Knight Says

Residents in the area, increasingly frustrated by the ongoing instability in their power supply, have been dealing with unplanned power outages and a new series of rolling blackouts across St. Thomas and St. John that began earlier this week. The rotation of power is expected to end Friday, according to the VI Water and Power Authority’s new executive director, Karl Knight.

On Wednesday, Mr. Knight appeared on the popular WTJX show “Analyze This” and discussed the reasons behind the power rotations on St. Thomas and St. John. “There is a problem with the propane system,” Mr. Knight told Jamila Russell, who was replacing longtime “Analyze This” host Neville James.

Due to a propane shortage, WAPA has “had to rely on some of the older units that we had in St. Thomas – Unit 23, Unit 27, Unit 15,” he revealed. Units 15 and 23 are inefficient machines, he said, and WAPA officials have referred to them as “the gas guzzlers.” Units 23 and 27 are also due for major maintenance and “so they continue to have issues when we have to run them for extended periods of time,” Mr. Knight continued.

“That’s why that propane terminal is critical,” Mr. Knight explained. “If we can’t run on propane, we’re going to fall back on the older legacy units that WAPA had before the Wartsila project, and we’re going to be in a situation where we now have a lot of unreliability.” With one of the units offline, “we’re trying to serve St. Thomas and St. John with just two generators; that’s just not enough capacity to fully serve the island.” Because there’s not enough supply to meet the islands’ power demands, “we have to rotate power until we get the propane system back up and running,” Mr. Knight acknowledged.

The immediate problem should be resolved shortly, Mr. Knight said. “Hopefully it won’t take five days.” The current problem with the propane terminal is tied to efforts to “make the connections to the new Wärtsiläs,” WAPA’s new CEO explained. “But that’s not a long-term problem,” he assured. Shortly afterwards, he reported that he had been contacted by his team, who explained the problem. “That’s going to be shut down until Friday,” Mr. Knight confirmed, referring to the propane system. “If we can get all three units up and running, we can get off rotary power. It’s a bit of a growing pain as we try to get the new units up and running.”

He reiterated, “We expect the rotation to end by Friday at the latest. We should be able to turn the propane system back on by Friday, and even if we don’t get Unit 23 up and running by then, we should be able to transport the islands (STT-STJ) again.”

With WAPA running generation for St. John and St. Thomas with three units for the next five months until the four new Wartsila generators have completed their generation process, the authority must perform a delicate balancing act. The loss of any of the three units will result in the rolling blackout scenario currently being experienced.