The Anguilla Electricity Company (ANGLEC) is installing a brand new and costly 5.2 megawatt diesel generator at its Corito Power Station.
ANGLEC’s recently-appointed General Manager, Tommy Hodge, told The Anguillian that the engine, ordered a year and a half ago from Wartsila, Finland, was purchased at a cost of US$5.8 million. Its installation should be completed by mid-April and will give the company the capability of meeting the growing demand for electricity until at least 2013.

The new generator being transported to Corito Power Station

The generator was financed by a loan from the Caribbean Commercial Bank and the National Bank of Anguilla both of which are shareholders in ANGLEC.
“One of the interesting things about the installation this time around was the fact that the vessel that brought the engine from Finland could not dock at Sandy Ground.” Mr. Hodge said. “As a result it had to transfer the engine in Crocus Bay to a barge which came over from St. Maarten.” The generator, which arrived on Saturday, January 31, was then offloaded at Road Bay and transported on Sunday, February 1, to the Corito Power Station where, as part of an expansion in 2005, a bay was reserved for it. Along with the other generators already in operation, the new engine will bring the electricity generating capacity at the Power Station to about 29 megawatts.

General Manager, Mr. Tommy Hodge

“Load demand grows every year and between the time when you order an engine and the time when it is actually installed, can be anywhere between two and three years so you have to predict what the load is going to be and then by the time you have installed the engine, the load will be at that level,” Mr. Hodge explained. “In this case we are installing this engine in anticipation that the load will grow. Quite frankly, the load has not grown to the extent we thought it would have (as a result of the recent downturn of the economy), but we are quite sure that it will be necessary to have this engine within the next year or so.”

West End Sub-station
Asked to comment on ANGLEC’s decision to establish a sub-station at West End, Mr. Hodge said the company was now in the midst of doing so. “The transformers have already been installed and we are constructing the line that goes from Corito Power Station to the West End Sub-Station,” he reported. “We are somewhere in Blowing Point stringing these lines and there are a number of outages being experienced by consumers in the areas of Little Harbour and Blowing Point.”
He went on: “I want the general public to know that this is being done as part of a necessary project to strengthen ANGLEC’s capacity and ability to provide a reliable supply of electricity. We regret the inconvenience that consumers are experiencing, knowing how essential electricity is and how dependent everybody is on it, but these are the pains we have to experience in order to grow into a large and more stable system.”
The ANGLEC sub-station is located at the back of the West Commercial Plaza on the road to West End. Mr. Hodge stated that the new facility would ensure a greater supply of electricity to the area and that the company was almost to the limit of the power it could provide there. He explained that the need to strengthen the infrastructure had come about as a result of the large hotel projects in the western end of the island and their big draw on the electricity system. The unmanned sub-station will be controlled remotely by fibre-optic lines. There will be a first phase of energising the plant at the end of this year and in 2010 it will be fully commissioned.

Reduction Of Fuel Surcharge
Mr. Hodge announced that with effect from February 1, ANGLEC had reduced the fuel surcharge by another ten cents in light of recent price reductions in its fuel charges. He said the company usually absorbed the elevated fuel costs when necessary and always jumped at the opportunity to pass on savings to consumers. The fuel surcharge which was previously 30 cents is now 20 cents.
The fuel surcharge was 50 cents in November, 2008. At the end of that month it dropped to 30 cents. It was as high as 55 cents in July.
Before assuming the post of General Manager of ANGLEC on December 1, last year, Mr. Hodge was Plant Manager at the Corito Power Station.

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