The Jamaica Public Service (JPS) is to submit a preliminary incident report on the all-island power outage that ran from Friday night (June 5) into Saturday morning (June 6) to the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) on Monday (June 8).

A comprehensive report on the incident will also become due within 30 days of the restoration of power.

Minister of Energy, Transport and Telecommunications, Hon. Daryl Vaz, has asked that a full, independent investigation be conducted to determine the cause of the island-wide system failure to ensure that there is not a recurrence.

“The Government expects transparency, accountability and clear answers. We remain committed to ensuring a reliable and resilient electricity system for all Jamaicans,” he said during a press conference at the JPS Corporate Office in Kingston on Saturday (June 6).

Prior to the press conference, Mr. Vaz convened a meeting with the leadership and technical teams of the JPS to review the circumstances surrounding the outage, sess restoration efforts and discuss next steps.

In his remarks following the meeting, the Minister noted that the all-island blackout caused significant disruption across Jamaica, affecting homes, businesses and essential services.

He emphasised that restoring safety and efficiency has been the immediate priority, while apologising for the “unfortunate, unacceptable situation.”

“I want to make it very clear at this point that it was a system failure of the JPS and to make sure that I state clearly that all of the conspiracy theories that have been making the rounds are fake news…I will not even repeat some of them because they are so ludicrous. This was a simple, or should I say, a straightforward system breakdown within the JPS apparatus,” Mr. Vaz said.

JPS President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Hugh Grant, noted that the island-wide shutdown of the electric grid at 9.02 last night, occurred while there was significant lightning activity in the vicinity of some critical generating stations, transmission facilities, and substations in the Corporate Area.

“As a result of the significant lighting activity, we lost five of our transmission lines emanating from one of our significant substations in the Corporate Area. In parallel with that, we had a cascading effect causing the loss of generation across the entire island. This cascading effect resulted in a shutdown of the entire grid,” he explained.

He noted that a fault was observed on one of the high-voltage transmission cables connecting the Hunt’s Bay power station to the Newport station in Kingston, while there was damage to equipment at the Rockfort substation.

He said that the JPS team quickly mobilised and begun responding to the situation.

“Within one hour, we were able to…black start (self-start) some of our generators on the western part of the island at Bogue, and we started to restore customers within one hour,” the JPS CEO informed.

He said that shortly thereafter, customers in the eastern and central parts of the island were reconnected to the grid.

“We continued that black starting and restoration of customers throughout the entire night, and I’m pleased to say as of 6.30 a.m. this morning, the entire grid was restored, and the customers that were impacted by this island-wide blackout and this particular incident have been fully restored to service,” Mr. Grant said.

He indicated that the JPS will now transition into the investigation phase to understand exactly what transpired and to pursue follow-up action to reduce the likelihood of any recurrence.

“The thing that we have to learn from right now is exactly what transpired that caused this cascading effect, whereby, as a result of lightning strikes in one area of the grid, we have a cascading effect of generating outages across the grid. That is not something that we would expect to happen, so we look to learn from that, understand what transpired there, and then put necessary measures in place going forward,” the JPS President said.

OUR Director-General, Ansord Hewitt, in his remarks, informed that the agency has been engaging with the JPS since Friday night.

“The OUR’s role when it comes to an incident like this…our concern, first of all, is to see how quickly the operator can get back the system online and restore services to customers safely. The other [concern] is to ensure that what is restored is stable. So, we’re concerned about the stability of the system,” he explained.

Mr. Hewitt noted that the OUR is also interested in finding out what happened, why it happened and what will be done to mitigate the possibility of similar occurrences in the future.

He said the OUR has therefore sent correspondence to the power supplier requesting a preliminary report, which it expects to receive by end of day on Monday.

“The regulatory framework provides 30 days for JPS to do essentially an incident report, setting out what transpired, doing a root cause analysis, providing us with recommendations and so on, which we will review. We will also determine what directives, what actions to take coming out of that,” Mr. Hewitt detailed.

He emphasised that the OUR will continue to monitor the situation to ensure that the system remains stable and that stakeholders learn from the incident.

“Part of the analysis that will take place is the extent to which there has been full compliance and full accounting for any directive, any lessons that were gained from previous incidents,” the OUR Director-General added.