The V.I. Water and Power Authority’s Governing Board voted unanimously Thursday morning to allot $1.52 million for a new transformer. Without the critical equipment, one of the long-troubled utility’s routine outages could plunge all of St. Croix into darkness, officials said.
The new power transformer, expected to be delivered by January 2026, would come from Missouri-based WEG Transformers USA, said Cordell Jacobs, WAPA’s interim director of generation. It would replace the aging T3 transformer.
“The T3 transformer is critical to the operations on the island of St. Croix,” Jacobs said. “Not replacing this transformer — if anything were to happen it would have a dire effect on St. Croix with a prolonged loss of power to the island.”
Different from a pole-mounted transformer, the T3 and similar units connect different voltage equipment at the Richmond plant in St. Croix, he said.
“The benefit to the people of St. Croix is, this transformer will restore redundancy to the Richmond Substation. That will lead to better reliability,” Jacobs said. “This is part of a larger project at Richmond. Eventually we will be replacing some of the other transformers at Richmond.”
Jacobs said replacing the T3 power transformer would allow easy replacement of other equipment.
Approval to buy the transformer, given at a hastily organized emergency meeting Thursday morning, was needed because the equipment’s price tag was above a set purchase order threshold, WAPA officials said.
WAPA CEO Karl Knight and CFO Lorraine Kelly said a purchase order was being prepared for the procurement process.
