KIUC’s Bissell outlines what’s happening with outages

LIHUE — Islandwide power outages that began Sunday afternoon left people all over Kauai temporarily without electricity or phone service through the weekend, and the problem may not be a quick fix.

“It’s been somewhat of a perfect storm,” KIUC President and CEO David Bissell said in an interview with TGI Monday morning.

Mechanical issues at two of KIUC’s major sites have have wreaked havoc with normal operations over the past week, and those problems are only compounded by multiply external factors, he said.

The first and third largest generators on the island are offline.

The generator at the Kapaia Power Station — the biggest on the island — went down Saturday due to some as-yet-unknown mechanical failure. On Monday morning, shortly before noon, KIUC was still working to diagnose the problem, Bissell said, who added that engineers at the Kapaia station in Lihue were in the process of taking the unit apart.

In the meantime, KIUC’s remaining generators are left to pick up the slack, a task made more difficult by the fact that another generator at the energy collective’s Port Allen facility has been down since last week. Bissell said repairs on that unit are in progress, but work is on hold while replacement parts, which have to be custom-machined, are being manufactured in the mainland.

Independent energy producers are struggling to carry their share of the island’s electricity needs.

For example, Bissell said Green Energy Team, a biomass energy company with a $90-million facility in Koloa responsible for supplying about 10% of the island’s electricity, hasn’t been operating at maximum capacity because of what Bissell described as excess “fuel stock moisture,” which basically means that the wood Green Energy burns to generate energy is soaked from rainwater.

Prolonged cloudy skies have cut down on the amount of energy captured and stored by solar panels.

“Mother nature hasn’t helped us,” Bissell said, explaining that the relative lack of sunshine over the past week has depleted KIUC power reserves. Weather forecasters are predicting continued cloudy weather, at least through Wednesday, meaning that KIUC will continue to struggle to replenish its batteries even as engineers can get the Kapaia Power Station generator back up and running.

Bissel said more details will be available later today following an internal meeting among KIUC officials this afternoon.