SABAH ELECTRICITY Sdn Bhd (SESB) chairman Datuk Seri Wilfred Madius Tangau has upbraided independent power producers (IPPs) for not being more responsible in informing the public about their shutdowns.
He said they should not leave the burden solely to SESB to explain to consumers when brownouts occur in the state.
“The owner (IPPs) is responsible for informing about breakdowns and shutdowns.
“Now everything SESB has to announce and (have) the burden to explain to the public when there is an outage. In the future, we want the IPPs to announce why, (and) what happened.”
“They cannot pass the burden to us all the time. Only when they are forthcoming can SESB announce a shortage or load shedding. It would be much easier to SESB,” he said in Kota Kinabalu yesterday.
Tangau said that the Kimanis power plant was shut down for an occupational and safety inspection, and the Ranhill power plant in Sepanggar suffered a breakdown.
Major outages happened in some areas within the state after SESB had to undertake load shedding to manage consumer demands, he added.
The troubled power utility firm has for years been the target of critics when power outages occur.
SESB is an 80% owned subsidiary of Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB) and 20% owned by the Sabah state government.
The shutdowns are expected to last between five days and a week. The Kimanis plant produces up to 95MW of power and Ranhill up to 60MW.
Sabah’s base load demand stands at 1,080MW with the maximum demand being 1,200MW, giving a reserve margin of less than 12%.
On another note, Tangau also rubbished the claim that he had hired 13 new staff as part of his appointment as chairman of SESB. He said the number was much less than that.
Responding to the opposition’s allegation that the additional hiring would cost a bomb for SESB, he said the appointments were to beef up the utility’s firm corporate communications.
“As you know there’s a lot of disinformation spread regarding SESB,” he said.
“The whole electricity supply ecosystem is a very complex system. It is not easily understood and easily twisted by anybody.
“I would like to enhance the communications capacity and capability of SESB.”
The range of communications includes social media. This was the basis of recruiting some of the staff.
“We are still in the process of doing all that. We will continue to enhance this to the extent of setting up SESB TV,” he said. – The Vibes, January 17, 2024
