THE Office of Utilities Regulation has lectured the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPSCo) about its “higher than acceptable level” of electricity outages and says that it fears the power cuts will continue into Christmas and over the winter tourist season.

So concerned is the OUR about the frequent power cuts that has hit Jamaica over the past week that it has demanded a detailed report from the light and power company of its maintenance programme and its plans for an early cauterisation of the problem.

“The office is concerned about the continuity of supply (of electricity) to the country over the Christmas period and the upcoming tourist season,” the OUR’s director-general, J Paul Morgan, said in a December 12 letter to the JPSCo’s head of government and regulatory affairs, Sam Davis. A copy of the letter was obtained by the Observer.

The OUR’s concern is deepened because fewer such system-wide power cuts were expected with the recent commissioning of a 120-megawatt plant in Bogue, St James.

Any explanation of the cause of the recent power outages, Morgan said in his letter, would be enhanced if JPSCo provided “a detailed analysis of distribution system performance, by month, for the period July – November”.

The light and power company has not commented publicly on the OUR’s letter, but last night Davis blamed the power cuts on the breakdown of its plants at Hunt’s Bay in Kingston and Old Harbour, St Catherine.

These two plants have a combined capacity of 120 megawatts – 60 each.

“We are experiencing forced outages due to some boiler tube leaks at Old Harbour and Hunt’s Bay units,” Davis said.

“We are working to restore the problems.”

Wisome Callum, JPSCo’s corporate relations manager, projected that the two units will be returned to service later this week, having undergone maintenance beyond the repair of the problems that caused the initial shut-down.

She expected that one of the units would have returned to service last night. “The other one is expected to return later this week,” Callum said.

The recent problems at JPSCo, a subsidiary of America’s Mirant Corporation, has been apparent since mid last week but worsened since the weekend.

Yesterday, businesses in some areas of Kingston complained of intermittent power outages which hampered production. Householders also complained.

The OUR is apparently suspicious that an inadequate maintenance schedule, or the failure of the JPSCo to follow its programme has contributed to the outages.

With its new Bogue plant and the electricity generated by private suppliers, the company is supposed to have a capacity of 780 megawatts, providing it with a 15 per cent margin over peak demand.

But apparently the breakdown of the Old Harbour and Hunt’s Bay units coincided with the removal of service of other plants for maintenance.

“JPSCo has enough capacity to shut down two units,” the OUR’s Morgan told the Observer. “Based on the plant expansion (of 120 megawatts) and the company’s maintenance schedule, it was expected that the company could maintain a reasonable supply of electricity without power outages.”

In his formal letter to the JPSCo, Morgan said that while his agency had not received technical reports for September and October, it had noted that “customer minutes lost due to distribution system outages have been trending upwards”.

“At the same time we had anticipated that the impact of generation outages would be less severe with the recent addition of the final tranche of the Bogue combined cycle plant,” he said.