No blackout for the Balearics thanks to the “Plan Meta”

PALMA
A blackout like the one which has happened in Barcelona, affecting 300'000 clients of Fecsa Endesa, could happen on the Balearics, according to experts, but Gesa Endesa's response to repair the fault would be “immediate”, as the “Plan Meta” is applied in these sort of cases.

Gesa has, on various occasions, said that the improvements introduced in the electricity supply network on the islands has meant an investment of more than 200 million euros by them during the last two years.

This investment has stepped up the generation of electricity to overcome the increase in consumption every Summer and so to avoid a blackout such as the one suffered by the island in the Summer of 2004.

At the same time as it was introducing these improvements, Gesa took advantage of the work being done on the network to introduce onto the islands a series of systems to minimise the risk of any incidents.

The heads of Gesa commented that “we have reduced the time to resolve incidents by 50 percent. And thanks to the Plan Meta, we are minimising the reaction time to repair the problem when a line falls down, because a complete team is sent out, made up of four or five cars, to control the network and repair the line immediately”.

With regard to the incident in Barcelona, where a cable falling down affected the rest of the supply network, experts say that the same thing could happen in the Balearic electricity supply network.

However, Gesa said that the difference between Barcelona and the Balearics is that 33 substations exist on the islands which supply electricity to some 600'000 clients throughout the Balearics.

This distribution of substations makes it impossible that a cable falling down in the same way as happened in Barcelona would affect a great number of clients. They added that, in the case of a failure in the network, immediate action would be taken at the point which produced the failure.

Gesa made it clear after the blackout of 2004, after complaints from the tourist sector, businesses and private clients, that a leading tourist destination should be able to count on its electricity supply to deal with the elevated demand in Summer, and that it would act forcefully and immediately to resolve any problems in the electricity supply network.