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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted at 10:47 a.m., Tuesday, December 2, 2003

Parts of Big Island go dark again

By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Big Island Bureau

HILO, Hawai'i — Electric-company workers were trying to determine the cause of the largest power failure of the year on the Big Island, an outage early this morning that cut electricity to about 33,000 residents and businesses.

Jay Ignacio, distribution manager for Hawai'i Electric Light Co., said about half of the company’s customers lost power across the island after the 14- megawatt Puna Steam Generator in Kea'au suddenly disconnected from the power grid at 12:12 a.m.

In a second mishap, half of the power output from Hamakua Energy Partners’ 60-megawatt generating facility at the Haina Mill site also suddenly disconnected, Ignacio said.

The combined effect was loss of power for about 33,000 Helco customers, including portions of the Hilo, Puna, Waimea, Kailua and Waikoloa population centers.

Ignacio said Helco was able to bring other generating units online to restore power to most customers by 12:47 a.m. Power was restored to the last 900 customers by 1:47 a.m., he said.

Ignacio said Helco believes the two failures are related, and said the company must work with independent power producer Hamakua Energy Partners to determine what happened there.

Ignacio said the generators are designed to automatically disconnect from the grid and reduce their output to prevent damage to the unit when something goes wrong, but Helco officials this morning had not yet determined what triggered the disconnections.

He said a variety of problems could prompt a generator to disconnect, ranging from too much pressure in boilers to problems with generator controls.

Police did not report any major problems because of the outages, and Ignacio said he is not aware of any reports of damaged equipment or other harm caused by the blackout.

In an apparently unrelated incident, Helco officials said they believe they have isolated the cause of an earlier outage last night that cut electricity to about 5,300 customers.

In that incident, two Helco generators in the Kanoelehua industrial area that produce a total of 33.5 megawatts in Hilo went offline at 10:02 p.m. Power was restored by 10:33, Ignacio company said.

He added that Helco officials have traced that problem to the battery power supply for computers that control the generators.

"It’s kind of ironic: They were generating power, but the power to the computers had a problem," Ignacio said.

Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 935-3916.