Jonathan van der Linden, Maintenance Specialist at NV Elmar explains that it’s true that recently electricity company Elmar is confronting interruptions in Elmar’s grid. Van der Linden explains that there are various factors for this, and heat is playing a big role.
Recently, the local community of Aruba is dealing with various problems with electricity in different areas of our island. According to Elmar, the high temperature is affecting Elmar’s grid recently, and not so much in the area of capacity, but more regarding wires under the ground, which short circuit affecting the area. There is also rain which is affecting Elmar’s installations, not only cables, but high voltage installations – humidity rises in the area and this has an effect on the installations.
Elmar continuously informs regarding maintenance on its equipment, this is something to try to mitigate the problem. There are times where bad weather has a big impact on Elmar. They always have their equipment and personnel ready for these times. At home, for example, people have a breaker box and there is a breaker that for example goes to the kitchen. In the kitchen you can have 10 stop contacts, and if one of these short circuits, all others lose power. This is also the case for Elmar, but on a much bigger scale.
Elmar’s personnel begin by isolating the problem in order to reestablish electricity supply. The humidity also has a big effect, particularly at night. It was also noted that these days, around 9pm the ‘peak’ is very high because everyone goes home, turns on their air conditioning; as well as having more electric vehicles these days, so the demand is high.
In the last week, Elmar experienced never-before seen peak, according to Van der Linden, where capacity was at 256 megawatt of transformer, meaning that there is enough capacity space. However, here and there it is possible for things to go wrong.
