A report from light and power company Jamaica Public Service on Thursday’s blackout which affected four parishes is now before the Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR).

The OUR on Thursday gave the company 24 hours to give the reasons behind the latest round of power cuts after customers in Kingston and St Andrew, Westmoreland and Portland were left without electricity for several hours.

According to the light and power company, the blackouts were as a result of load shedding, citing considerable shortfalls in generation output due to the loss of units by its independent power provider and scheduled maintenance of its own plants.

But on Friday, deputy director general of the OUR, Raymond Silvera, told the Observer that the office would be taking some time to consider the report before making a public statement. The OUR’s response, he said, would be made public by Thursday.

According to Silvera, the delay is due to several reasons, including the fact that two major independent power producers – the Jamaica Energy Partners and the Jamaica Private Power Company – were involved.

“We have to make sure that we get accurate information from them as well so that the picture that emerges is perfectly correct so we can do a proper analysis,” Silvera told the Observer.

In the meantime, he said the cause for Thursday’s outage on “was pretty much in line” with what the company had said in the aftermath.

“[It] is pretty much in line with what the company has signalled, mainly that there was a significant generation shortfall of up to 170 megawatts and the generating units were out of service,” he explained.

He, however, said that the OUR would be looking into “why this is so”.

“We need to know whether there are good reasons for it and if there are any other factors that precipitated the power cut and whether, in fact, there is anything that can be done to prevent a recurrence,” he added.

He said that while the JPS had not indicated what measures would be taken in the interim, the OUR would be making its own recommendations after it reviews the report.

Only last month the entire island was plunged into darkness, which JPS said was due to problems at its power station in Old Harbour Bay, St Catherine.

The power outage came almost a year after the July 15 islandwide blackout which the company then said was caused by lightning. The OUR at the time issued several directives to the JPS advising the Utility company of action it needed to take to prevent a recurrence.