At approximately 10:45 today, we suffered a failure on a High Voltage cable which provides power to the LNG terminal facility at North Mole. At the time, power was being generated using natural gas. The interruption of power supply to the facility in turn interrupted the gas supply to the North Mole Power Station, resulting in fuel starvation to the engines thus causing a major power outage.
Our ability to restore power as promptly and as safely as possible, was on this occasion delayed by a system communications problem suffered between one of our main distribution centres and the North Mole Power Station, compounded by the need to manually isolate the fault as per safety protocols. The first element of restoration of power at around 11:30 had to be done without using the remote high voltage switching facility. Once this system was re-enabled, the process of restoring power thereafter to the remaining affected customers was accelerated.
The power supply to the LNG terminal was restored once the high voltage grid was reconfigured, and our engines are again combusting natural gas for the generation of power.
ENDS
