Maintenance issues first triggered by one of the Randolph Harley power plant’s aging “legacy” units have stymied attempts to restore power to large swathes of St. Thomas and St. John and end the latest episode of persistent outages, V.I. Water and Power Authority Chief Executive Officer Karl Knight said during a press conference Monday morning.
“We are working on bringing up additional generation, but I must point out that the plant remains in an unstable condition,” Knight said. “We have been through this over the last two days of starting to restore power. We have … encountered issues that have caused the plant to trip offline, so we can expect that as we bring up these generating units today, there will remain some periods of instability, and we may have to start the restoration process over if we lose the generation units.”
For many on St. Thomas and St. John, power has been sporadic at best since shortly after 6 p.m. Saturday when Unit 27, an aging generator at the Randolph Harley Power Plant, tripped because of a fuel valve issue. Knight said that led to a “series of cascading technical issues” at the Randolph Harley power plant. Unit 27 was brought back online several weeks ago after a similar issue with Unit 15 — another legacy generator — caused days of rotational outages in the district.
“Unit 27 was pressed into service to end those rotations but has not performed optimally since that time,” Knight said Monday. “Attempts to restore service utilizing solely the Wartsilas has resulted in issues with the fuel system and with the air systems. Our maintenance mechanics, electricians, engineers and plant managers have been working around the clock since Saturday evening to resolve these issues.”
Knight said the struggling utility asked Wartsila for personnel to troubleshoot the generators. Some arrived on St. Thomas Monday morning, and Knight said more were expected later in the day.
The Randolph Harley Power Plant has seven Wartsila units. Four of those were commissioned to much fanfare in January 2025 after sitting idle on the island for years, but they quickly ran into problems running on cheaper, more efficient liquefied petroleum gas. During a federal consent decree conference six weeks ago, WAPA Project Management Director Maxwell George told a judge that the four newer generators experienced a “catastrophic failure” when they attempted to run them on LPG, and all seven have issues with controls meant to limit the emission of nitrous oxides and carbon monoxide. While U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney signaled a willingness to issue a court order compelling Wartisla to come to the table, Knight said Monday that court intervention “perhaps would not be helpful at this point in them.”
Knight said there are two aspects to the WAPA’s relationship with Wartsila: a dispute over the generators’ warranty period and “ongoing conversations” about the root cause of the generators’ failures.
“I think what’s important for the court and the public to understand is: we own those generators, and at least they’re not rented — we own them — and they’re going to be with us for the foreseeable future, so the relationship with manufacturer of the generators, as we move forward, is also important to weigh in balance. So there are two separate issues. I think we can address the warranty issues,” he said before drawing a line between that conversation and the dispute over operation and maintenance of the units. “And those two conversations probably need to be kept separate.”
St. Thomas and St. John in particular have been plagued by prolonged, persistent outages in recent months, but Knight shied away from describing the situation as a state of emergency and described it instead as a “power crisis.”
“If it becomes a prolonged crisis, perhaps we can start to refer to it as an emergency. We believe that we can make some progress into stabilizing and normalizing the grid, and if we’re unable to do so, or the prognosis becomes more…,” he said before changing tack. “I know there’s a lot of PTSD from the last round of outages that lasted two and a half weeks. As of this morning, I have no expectation that this will be nearly as prolonged an event.”
Knight said later that an official emergency declaration “changes the scenario” because WAPA already receives substantial federal funding and technical assistance.
“We have federal dollars that are being deployed both for repair and replacement in the power plant,” he said. “We have ongoing relationships with consultants and technical assistance. The federal state of emergency — while it sounds good — doesn’t change the mode of operation for us significantly.”
Both of the territory’s power plants are slated for Federal Emergency Management Agency-funded replacement. The government inked an agreement in May with R-G Engineering and Javelin Gramercy Ventures to perform the replacement, and Knight said Monday that R-G has identified temporary generators to install on St. Thomas while the companies overhaul the plant. He estimated that the temporary units will be installed within 12 months of their purchase.
“They’re probably not going to be as efficient as what we can get with new modern generators — especially if we’re able to return the plant to what we call a combined cycle, using the waste heat to produce steam and additional energy,” he said. “So the permanent generators are going to improve our efficiency, but these generators are going to be large, heavy-duty, industrial generators that can carry the load.”
