Published on: Thursday, April 30, 2009 |
Kota Kinabalu: Sabah Electricity Sdn Bhd (SESB) stopped "transferring" power from the West Coast to the East Coast since several days ago.
Its Senior General Manager, Peter Lajumin, said it simply does not make sense to do it since the West Coast is also experiencing power shortage.
He said the utility company reasoned that it must maintain system stability to prevent a total system collapse.
"So, during the shortfall of (power) generation, no power from the West flowed to the East," he said at a media briefing here, Wednesday.
He said this is paramount because otherwise they would be facing a dangerous situation where the entire power system would fail.
Nevertheless, Peter said the SESB still has to continue with its planned maintenance of the power generation sets.
He said the company does not want to be caught in a situation where the machines will suffer more damage.
In view of the load shedding, he said they have devised several steps to manage the situation.
Firstly, he said a Demand Side Management (DSM) would be activated which means that consumers such as factories with their own generation sets would activate their sets to offset power disruption.
Secondly, he said once SESB detected a drop in the power frequency, it would immediately conduct load shedding to prevent the system from collapsing.
"Thirdly, we mobilise mobile sets to supply power in selective areas such as commercial complexes," he said.
Fourthly, Peter said SESB would meet companies such as the Sabah Forest Industries (SFI) and request that the SFI use their own generation system.
Power saved from this exercise, he said, would be shared with other consumers through the Voluntary Curtailment of Electricity Usage (VCEU).
But if all these are not helping to ease the situation, Peter said they could impose load shedding on a rotation basis such as three hours per area.
"This is only a guideline and if we see the need, we can prolong the load shedding to more than three hours," he said.
On other developments, he said due to the load shedding, it is hard to maintain the System Average Interruption Duration Index (Saidi) to less than 1,000 minutes.
Last year, he said the Saidi in Sabah was 1,947 minutes and as of March, this year, it was 724.
He said they are targeting to hit less than 700 Saidi in 2010. But to achieve it, he said the company would need about RM2 billion.
On committed and planned power plants, Peter said there are four in its plan, namely Ranhill (190MW), Kimanis Phase I and II (300MW), Coal-Fired IPP Phase I and II (300MW) and Upper Padas Hydro and Liwagu Hydro (300MW).
He said the Ranhill power plant is expected to be ready by next year while Kimanis Phase I in 2012, Kimanis Phase II (2019), coal-fired IPP Phase I (2013), IPP Phase II (2014), Upper Padas (2017) and Liwagu (2018).
Meanwhile, SESB Managing Director, Baharin Din, said there is a very serious need for a power plant to be set up in the East Coast of Sabah.
And at the moment, he said the most efficient would be to set up a coal-powered plant but that it has met with strong objections.
