THE Office of Utilities Regulation (OUR) says it is yet to make recommendations to the Jamaica Public Service Company (JPSCo) since questions are still unanswered about the August 2 load shedding which left customers in four parishes without electricity for hours.

The OUR had issued a 24-hour ultimatum following the blackouts, requesting further answers from the JPSCo, Jamaica Energy Providers (JEP), and the Jamaica Private Power Company (JPPC), for the outage which left Kingston and St Andrew, Westmoreland and Portland without electricity.

At the time the light and power company said the blackouts resulted from load shedding brought on by considerable shortfalls in generation output due to the loss of units by its independent power providers and scheduled maintenance of its own plants.

The OUR had said it would issue a comment on the blackout report by last Thursday.

But yesterday, director of Consumer and Public Affairs at the OUR, David Geddes, told the Observer that “no recommendation has been made as yet”.

“There are a lot of questions, a lot of information that we need which is extremely technical. It’s going to take a little time, and we can’t make any recommendations until we ascertain the full extent of the problem,” Geddes said.

He said the OUR would have to satisfy itself that it had all the necessary information before it made any recommendations.

“It would be difficult to make recommendations in the absence of knowing everything that took place,” he emphasised.

Asked whether this was because of the inadequate report submitted by the JPS outlining the cause of the load shedding, Geddes said this was not so and insisted much diligence was warranted based on the technical nature of the situation and the fact that two other independent power providers were involved.

“When you are dealing with these technical matters, the fact is that no matter how much information you get, your technical people are going to require additional information,” Geddes said.

He advised, however, that the OUR had started the inquiry.

“We have started that process but I can’t put a timeline to it. In these matters it’s not like you are just looking at something in isolation. It’s a lot of different things you are dealing with,” Geddes pointed out.

In its report on the situation, the JPS said its system had been down by 280 megawatts on the day in question. Leading up to that, three JPSCo generators had been out before August 2, a JEP barge with a capacity of 74 megawatts was removed from service earlier that morning, while two JPPC units tripped out leading to the load shedding.

Geddes, in the meantime, took pains to point out that the August 2 load shedding had nothing to do with the all-island power outage that took place in July of this year nor the one which affected the island in July of last year.

“None of these things are connected, these things are not related, they are different instances with different causation,” he insisted.

He said while it was not possible to say what measures would prevent a recurrence, the “likelihood of all those things happening again is not likely”.

“I’m not about to say it can’t happen. But it’s unlikely; we have some 818 megawatts of installed generating capacity. Our peak demand is six hundred and odd; that leaves about a 30 per cent reserve margin, so if that is in place we really ought not to be too worried,” he said.