Ukudu power plant 90.5% done; GPA reports biggest power capacity in 'a while'
The Ukudu power plant is inching closer to activation and is about 90.5% complete as of Aug. 31, Guam Power Authority General Manager John Benavente told the Consolidated Commission on Utilities on Thursday.
Additionally, efforts to bump up generation capacity and stave off load shedding is bringing power generation capacity closer to 320 megawatts, more than the island has had in "a while," Benavente said.
The pipelines that will feed fuel to the Ukudu power plant have all been installed and pressure tested, Benavente said, and contractors are preparing a Piti tank farm for the installation of a pump for the fuel.
"I think in the next month or two, they'll be ready to transfer fuel," he said.
Ukudu's massive fuel tank is certified for the storage of diesel, and will be ready for fill up once the pipeline comes online.
The new 198 MW power plant isn't scheduled for completion until September 2025, but it will come online for testing earlier and start feeding some power into the grid.
"Once you start testing, you start seeing some reduction in fuel costs," he said, with the new more efficient plant burning less expensive fuel than the aging Cabras 1 and Cabras 2 generators.
Ukudu's switchyard, which will feed electricity into transmission lines and the rest of the grid, is already fired up and tested, the Pacific Daily News reported in July.
Load shedding updates
By next month, GPA expects to have about 320 MW of generation capacity, Benavente said.
Some 12 MW of that capacity comes from assistance from the Navy, and another 16 MW is provided by big power users agreeing to go to generator power during peak demand time.
The 320 MW bump will give the utility a wide margin to deal with an anticipated 267 MW of demand from customers, based on presentations from the general manager.
Baseload generator Cabras 1 will be down for maintenance next month, and will have to be offline for about eight days, according to Benavente.
"I cannot say 100% that it mitigates...load shedding, but it certainly alleviates everything," he said.
Around this time last year, when residents were seeing hundreds of hours of load shedding a month, GPA was hovering around 270 MW of capacity.
Since then, GPA has installed temporary generators and worked to repair and overhaul a number of its aging generators.
Daily demand is trending upwards in recent months, reaching levels the island hasn't seen since pre-pandemic, when over 1 million tourists touched down on Guam in a year, the PDN reported last month. When GPA can't keep up with that demand, it has to implement rotating outages or load shedding.
The activation of the Ukudu power plant next year is expected to end Guam's vulnerability to load shedding.
There were a little over two hours of load shedding reported on Aug. 27. GPA has attributed outages experienced by the public this month to transmission line failure, and the passage of Tropical Storm Bebinca.
