Kota Kinabalu: An unexpected gas supply curtailment from the Sabah Oil Gas Terminal (SOGT), supposedly channeled to the Kimanis Power Plant, resulted in a power load shedding on Wednesday. Several areas like Tg Aru, Putatan and others were affected by a rotating outage due to insufficient generation capacity, with as much as 130MW of power lost in the glitch. Sabah Electricity Sdn Bhd (SESB) had announced on Tuesday that they would be conducting a load rejection test at the Kimanis Power Plant, where they expected to conduct the exercise at 5pm, involving 72MW of energy load.
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It said the technical issue stemming from SOGT resulted in the gas supply not being channeled to the plant owned by an Independent Power Producer. "At the same time, the present set of reliable power plants would only be able to generate 800MW of electricity a day, where the highest recorded is 874.4MW," it said.
SESB had since postponed the load rejection test until further notice. They expect the new Kimanis Power Plant to be able to supply up to 100MW of electricity to the Sabah Interconnection Grid System by June.
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SESB also denied that a total blackout would happen due to the situation. "Consumers are encouraged to visit the SESB website to get the latest updates on load shedding.
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The schedules are uploaded everyday before 9am except for public holidays, Saturday and Sunday," it explained.
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Meanwhile, Malaysia Airport Holding Bhd said a power outage that occurred at the Kota Kinabalu International Airport had no connection with the load shedding exercise. Manager Sunip Naiman said a contractor currently undertaking the airport upgrading work accidentally hit a cable and caused the blackout.