Crown Bay got a little louder recently when four long-awaited Wärtsilä generators came online.
During a ribbon-cutting ceremony at St. Thomas’ Randolph Harley Power Plant Friday morning, V.I. Water and Power Authority Executive Director and CEO Karl Knight called the commissioning a “significant evolution” in the territory’s power generation — four nine-megawatt engines, utility-scale battery storage and the “full embrace of smaller, more nimble” generating units.
“On any given day,” he said, the generators can run entirely on liquid petroleum gas or on diesel. “And we can switch that on a dime.”
Friday’s ceremony came nearly nine months after Gov. Albert Bryan Jr. declared a state of emergency amid incessant blackouts caused by the Water and Power Authority’s deferred maintenance and debts to vendors. The four units celebrated Friday have been on St. Thomas since 2021 — but disputes over payment kept them idle. Getting the units up and running has long been touted as a crucial step toward increasing reliability and affordability for WAPA customers on St. Thomas and St. John.
“The wonderful thing about a relay race is when you get to run the anchor leg — because you’re the one that gets to bust the tape and celebrate the victory,” Knight said Friday, lauding the work of his predecessors and colleagues who helped bring the project across the finish line. Knight also thanked Wärtsilä for implementing a “one-of-a-kind” control system.
Matthew DeHaven, senior business development manager for Wärtsilä, said the engine system will control the generators in coordination with the battery storage system to optimize the energy production in accordance with demand. Comparing the new system to running a gas turbine, DeHaven said, “That’s like taking a big locomotive to the grocery store when you need to just take a car to the grocery store to do your errands.”
“So the engines … are much more nimble and agile. What that does is it allows the utility and the power plant here to meet the load spikes and demand at a much quicker basis than firing up a huge gas turbine would,” he said. “So it’s much more instantaneous power and much more reliable in that aspect.”
DeHaven added that having multiple engines provides a safety net for WAPA customers on St. Thomas and St. John.
“If one has to go down for routine maintenance or for corrective maintenance, there’s redundant backup with the other engine generators that allow that to happen,” he said.
While leading a tour of the plant for officials and media, WAPA Automation Controls Manager Kevin Harrigan repeatedly noted how strange it was — in a good way — to have backup generators on the table.
Bryan ran through the Water and Power Authority’s checklist of goals: implementing battery storage, connecting the Estate Petronella and Hogansborg solar farms, and securing new diesel and liquid petroleum gas contracts. Some of those have already been accomplished.
“But the biggest hurdle still remains — the finances,” he said, adding that he’s been looking at ways to refinance the utility’s debt with Knight.
“One of the things I’m going to really push again in this administration — hopefully with the assistance of President Trump and the Republican trifecta — we could really get the U.S. Treasury to back the bonds of the U.S. territories only,” he said. “If they do that, that changes the credit rating of the Virgin Islands, Guam … and what that would do is allow us to get money way cheaper — and even refinance the debt that we can —- again, putting more money into the General Fund, but allowing for stability among our entities like WAPA, Port Authority and whatnot.”
Knight said that with the new generators, the utility is already seeing an uptick in noise — “but we put it up with it because it’s a lot more fuel efficient.” WAPA is also seeing savings in its propane consumption and an overall reduction in its need to buy and burn diesel.
“The grid is becoming more reliable. There are some issues, there’s some things I have to work out in the distribution system to — we’ll never be perfectly reliable,” he said. “We’re a small tropical island in the middle of the ocean,” he said. “But we can get to a point where it’s not a daily nuisance, where I want outages to be a rare thing. They’ll happen — they’ll probably happen more frequently than in New York City — but it shouldn’t be so frequent that it’s a daily part of our lives and our understanding.”
During Friday’s ceremony, Bryan also proclaimed Jan. 17 to be a Day of Honor for acting U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Adrianne Todman.
“Adrianne Todman has brought pride and honor to the Virgin Islands through her unwavering commitment to public service,” he said. “Her leadership has been pivotal in advancing energy resilience and supporting projects critical to our recovery and rebuilding efforts. Today, we celebrate her as a trailblazer whose work exemplifies the best of what Virgin Islanders can achieve.”
