The V.I. Water and Power Authority expects to keep St. Thomas and St. John on a daily power rotation schedule through Wednesday while technicians repair an aging generator at the Randolph Harley Power Plant. WAPA Chief Executive Karl Knight said during a Government House briefing Monday that the rotations are expected to begin around 9:30 a.m. each day and continue through peak demand hours until about 9:30 to 10 p.m.
“I know these outages are hard. I know they’re disruptive to the workday, they’re disruptive to schools, they’re disruptive to our essential workers,” he said. “I assure you that our plant personnel are working around the clock to restore full service.”
Government House spokesperson Richard Motta Jr. said that Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. will likely not declare a state of emergency like the one declared in April 2024 amid repeated outages.
“When the governor calls for a state of emergency, it is because there is a clear pathway for something to be done about the existing issue,” he said. “For example, when he called the state of emergency the last time, it was to enable the government of the Virgin Islands to use funding from the rainy-day fund to assist the Virgin Islands Water and Power Authority.”
The latest round of outages came just days after power was restored to St. John following an apparent act of vandalism to the island’s transmission cable. On Thursday, Unit 15 was taken offline because of an equipment failure. Knight said during a Government House briefing Monday that two other so-called “legacy” generators were also down for maintenance and that the loss of Unit 15 left a 5-megawatt shortfall in generation, leading to days of rotating outages.
“To put things in perspective, Unit 15 has been slated for retirement,” he added. “The average life expectancy of a gas turbine is somewhere around 30 years. Unit 15 was installed in 1980, making it about 46 years old — so it’s well past its expected life expectancy.”
Both Unit 15 and another legacy generator, which has already been decommissioned, Unit 14, have been approved for replacement by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A WAPA press release Monday noted that while funding for the replacements has been obligated by the V.I. Disaster Recovery Office, “processing and approvals from ODR have taken longer than anticipated.”
“We hope that in the short term, we’ll be able to provide temporary generation that will allow us to rely less on Unit 15,” Knight said. “We are also looking forward to the permanent replacement of the unit, along with the installation of additional battery and energy storage systems into the Harley Plant.”
Knight said later that ODR and the V.I. Public Finance Authority are “tantalizingly close” to executing an agreement with RG Engineering for the FEMA-funded power plant rebuilds, which will involve setting up temporary generation while they work on the full replacement.
While Knight stressed that the latest outages were caused by years of deferred maintenance and not financial or fuel supply issues, fuel prices the world over have surged because of the United States’ war in Iran. Virgin Islanders have felt the impact, and Bryan last week directed commissioners and agency heads to restrict government vehicle use to official and essential activities.
“Outside of those measures … the Department of Licensing and Consumer Affairs also is doing their due diligence to make sure that, similarly, our merchants aren’t taking advantage of this opportunity,” Motta said during Monday’s briefing. Motta said DLCA had already cited one vendor for increasing their gas prices before filing the proper paperwork.
