The Gibraltar Electricity Authority have apologised for any inconvenience to the public on account of the power outage that occurred on Friday 8th March 2013 affecting 5 districts of consumers. The outage occurred at approximately 00.08 hrs with all consumers having power restored by about 00.11hrs.

The power outage was as the direct result of human error. An operator in GMES power station control room inadvertently shed the load of the generators too quickly as part of the operation of shutting down the engines in the south district power station/s for the night. This action caused the system frequency to drop below 1.5 Hertz for over 50 milliseconds thus activating the falling frequency load shedding protection to be activated.

The extra generators hired are the ones that are helping Gib Elec to cope with all the maintenance backlog that is going on. This maintenance has been lacking for years and, if they had not acquired these generators, Gibraltar would be experiencing power cuts related to generating capacity which have not occurred since the new turbines were installed.

The Gibraltar Electricity Authority continues to work to ensure similar events do not result in power outages in the future.