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By Libya Herald staff.
Tripoli, 23 August 2014:
The commissioning of Sirte’s Gulf Power Station was dealt a further blow today as . . .[restrict]the plant’s first new turbine broke down.
The General Electric Company of Libya (GECOL) told the Libyan News Agency LANA that a team of technicians had been dispatched to the site and that maintenance would take place over the next 48 hours. There has been no indication of why the turbine malfunctioned.
The power station has been dogged by a series of maintenance issues. The now-broken turbine was the first of four to be brought on line by GECOL following the arrival of the first shipment fuel to the station at the beginning of last month. Thirty six thousand cubic metres of light fuel oil arrived in Sirte for the power set just three days ago. It was hoped at the time that the additional fuel would significantly increase energy production for the national grid.
The brand-new power generation set, one of four 350-megawatt turbines, was robbed and vandalised in May, in the course of which two power lines collapsed. The incident delayed the opening of the new power plant by more than two months.
The number of badly-needed foreign staff to service the the Gulf Power Station has been depleted by ongoing security problems. Some 1,300 Korean engineers left Libya and their work on the power plant at the beginning of this month. However a team of 350 employees from the Turkish company Gama, arrived at around the same time.
With regular power cuts across the country, particularly in Tripoli and Benghazi, GECOL had promised that a fully operational Sirte Power Station would alleviate stress on the national grid.
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