Bethel experienced two brownouts in two consecutive days. A plant manager says that it was a wear and tear issue with one of the generator’s wires.
Some residents in Bethel lost electricity in their households and businesses for about a half-hour around 6:00 p.m. last Tuesday. The reason for the outage was that one of the three running generators at the local power plant shut down.
After the outage, plant workers started another generator to get power going normally again. They then looked over the generator that had shut down, and found a loose connection that they fixed. They thought that repairing the connection would take care of the problem, and started the generator up again last Wednesday. The power plant's Operations Manager, Lenny Welch, says that worked, but only for a while.
"And it ran for 10 hours before shutting down again. On the twenty-sixth we found a rubbed wire burnt inside of a conduit on the engine, cause of the vibration. We repaired that and it shouldn’t be an issue anymore. Just kind of a mechanical failure that happens from time to time," said Welch.
Welch says that a wire connecting to a hot oil switch from the generator was damaged, shorted out, and caused the machine to shut down. Then the other two running generators had to pick up the slack.
“The other engines were trying to work too hard, and that’s what the customers [were] seeing: the reduced cycles, and the little bit lower voltage that what would be normal," said Welch.
The power plant in Bethel has six generators, and three of them have to be running to supply adequate power for the city. Using the backup generators, plant workers were able to get the power back on after about a half-hour on both days.
Alaska Village Electric Cooperative took over Bethel’s electrical services in 2014, and is modernizing the facility.
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