Utility director Chris Brewton says he would have “bet his paycheck” that there would have been more outages like today’s during the commissioning of the Blue Lake turbines. Instead, he expects to do more fine-tuning over time. (Blue Lake Expansion Project photo)
All of Sitka lost power for a little under an hour Wednesday afternoon (2-4-15) when a protective relay tripped at the Jarvis St. diesel substation.
Utility director Chris Brewton says the community was running on a combination of diesel power and the No. 1 Green Lake turbine when the outage occurred. The new substation at Blue Lake had been taken offline for service.
When technicians re-energized Blue Lake, the relay tripped at Jarvis, cutting off power to Sitka.
Brewton says his department expected many more of this type of outage during the commissioning of the new Blue Lake turbines, but “that process went beautifully.”
He considers every outage unique, and with an all-new system like Sitka’s there will be a lot of tweaking.
This was the first time the department had produced power with this particular combination of equipment. And while he says he’ll be checking into the coordination between protective relay systems, Brewton hasn’t ruled out gremlins for Wednesday’s trouble.
