New feeder for Gerehu as blackouts continue, causing outrage by residents

Residents of the Gerehu Suburb in the nation's capital have expressed outrage and frustration after daily blackouts which have become more frequent in recent weeks.

While its varied between its different stages, outages have been up to over 30 hours for some stages and others 48 to 72 hours, and some just on and off.

Rosemary Laki, a resident of stage 5 told NBC News, the outages are ridiculous as it impacted heavily on average households:

“The black outs have been more frequent than usual, from very short intervals of time to very long periods of time – the longest from Friday to Monday morning. So more than 30 hours of power outage.

This has greatly impacted the average household in terms of children doing their schoolwork, loss of expenses, frozen goods having to be thrown out.

Also, the erratic nature of the black outs has had a damaging effect on electronic devices. As paying customers, this is ridiculous – we shouldn’t have to be putting up with such poor service.”  

Ganjiki Wayne, a resident of stage 3B raised concerns about financial implications of these prolonged outages.

"The daily/nightly black outs have stretched us financially as we have to use our small standby genset every evening which costs K30 worth of fuel everyday. This is apart from the inconvenience of having power at home".

Tauye Tauye of Gerehu stage 1 says he's lost business and revenue due to these unacceptable outages.

"We've had continuous power outages for the last 12 months. It has become more frequent this last month. The power goes off on 2-5 minute intervals, 8 to 20 times every day, for the last month.

I've lost electrical appliances. I've lost business and revenue. It's become so frequent, it's almost normal. We shouldn't live like this in this big city. It's totally unacceptable". 

Parkop calls for decisiveness on blackouts

NCD Governor Powes Parkop has expressed serious concerns about the ongoing power outages faced in the city.

He told NBC News, the Government needs to take a decisive and strategic action on PNG Power Limited - proposing to have PPL commercialized for areas like NCD.

Parkop says options will vary for provinces and these are either for PPL to be a service delivery entity while another is for it to make money:

“My view has always been that PNG Power has a structural problem and also it cant be a purely service oriented state owned enterprise or state owned company providing service at the same time trying to generate income.

"We have to make some strategic decisions about some parts of the country, we keep it as a service and some parts of the country like Port Moresby, we commercialize it or maybe go into real partnership.”

The NCD Governor says despite new power companies coming onboard, the power issue is still ongoing:

“A city such as port Moresby and any other city for that matter cannot function with that type of inadequate and unreliable power supply.

"It's creating a lot of problems especially for business houses, instead of focusing on their core business – they have to become electrician and generate power.

"The result of it is that they don’t do their business well and secondly, they are passing the costs to the customers.” the Governor said.

Gerehu to have new feeder

The chronic power outages which have now become a norm in areas like Gerehu, in the nation's capital is expected to be addressed through a new feeder.

PNG Power Limited Acting Chief Executive Nehemiah Naris says the current situation is that Gerehu gets power through the Waigani feeder 4.

In response to questions from this newsroom says, Gerehu is one of the largest suburbs in the city where demand has grown significantly and this has impacted on power supply during peak hours resulting in outages.

Naris however says, P-P-L is investing in a new feeder to run parallel with the 9mile - Gerehu back that will be commissioned at the end of this month or April:

“Right now what we are faced is, is we have an overload where the demand for the line has grown significantly so when the demand grows during the peak hours, we have outages.

"But look, our technical teams are working on that, they’re trying to address that.  But from our end we’ve invested in a new feeder that’s coming from Nine mile. We hope to have that commissioned at the end of this month or April.

"It will be running parallel with the Nine mile Gerehu back road so once that feeder comes on, that will ease the load and we hope to improve reliability in our largest suburb of Gerehu,” Mr Naris said.

He says another express feeder will also be built at the Boroko sub station to the Gordons Industrial area:

“The Nine mile – Gerehu is one. We’ll be building another express feeder from Boroko sub-station down inoto Gordons industrial to help support the industrial load there.”

 The P-P-L acting CEO says it's not an issue of power generation rather one of improving transmission and distribution.