Found at: http://www.anguillaguide.com/article/articleprint/3447/-1/140/

ANGLEC ADDS GREATER POWER Keeping Ahead Of Island's Development

The Anguilla Electricity Company (ANGLEC) is substantially upgrading its power plant with the addition of two massive state-of-the-art generators to meet the growing needs of the island.

One of the two Wartsila engines on the way to the power station

“What this means is that we would be adding approximately 7.8 megawatts of available energy to the Anguillian public,” ANGLEC’S General Manager, Neil McConnie said on Tuesday, March 28, when the engines arrived. “We must do this in order to keep ahead of the development of the island. We cannot react; we have to be proactive to ensure that there is sufficient energy for us to be able to satisfactorily supply the new hotels, villas and the golf course that are coming on stream.” When the engines are installed and commissioned in about five weeks, the Corito Power Station will have a total output of just short of 26 megawatts.

The megawatt generating sets, each 3.9 megawatts, were manufactured by Wartsila in Finland and the company has sent its engineers and technicians to do the installation work. “Before we had electro-mechanical protection units but we now are going to have micro-processor-based protection units,” Mr. McConnie explained.

ANGLEC’s GM, Neil McConnie and ABB’s Trainer, Mark Resinweaver

These units do just about everything that an engineer would want done on a generation or distribution system. They record events, provide voltage protection or give you under frequency or over frequency protection whatever you want to analyze a system.”

The generators will be housed in the new extension in the west of the power plant where there is acoustic cladding to reduce the noise level. The machines themselves have been designed so that their emissions are also substantially reduced.

ANGLEC’s staff in training session

Both engines cost 6.4 million US dollars. Added to that is the cost of extending the power station building and a modern workshop to the south. The overall figure amounts to just over 9 million US dollars, Mr.McConnie told The Anguillian. The Caribbean Development Bank funded the cost of the engines in the main and ANGLEC mainly financed the extension of the building and the mechanical workshop.

Asked what message he had for consumers with the arrival of the new generators, he said: “We are doing everything possible to ensure that we satisfy our customers. Unfortunately, our fuel prices are still quite high. Incidentally, these two machines will be more fuel efficient and we are hoping that we will be able to perhaps make the entire system more efficient that is get more kilowatts per gallon of fuel.

Another section of ANGLEC’s staff in training workshop

“We are not pundits and we cannot predict what will happen to the oil prices, but what we must say is that the base price of electricity has not moved since 1997…We have had additions to bills because of the high price of fuel, but if fuel prices were to drop to normal where they were a few years ago, customers will find that their electricity bill will be just what it was five-seven years ago.”

Meanwhile, ANGLEC has made sure that the persons to operate the new system are fully equipped through a training workshop this week conducted by ABB Technicians from Pennsylvania to understand the operation of the generators and to deal with the new technology to be introduced shortly.

The generators were shipped from Finland a month ago to St. Maarten. From there they were transported to Anguilla on special heavy equipment by Joseph Richardson (Joe Joe) aboard the barge, St. Kitts.

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