On the surface, electricity appears very straightforward; you flip a switch and turn on a light, blend a smoothie, watch television or any of the other things you use electricity to do at your home or business. But behind the scenes, there is constant activity on the part of the utility provider to balance and match generation supply to all our consumers in realtime to ensure you have power to do all those things. As you might imagine, the demand for this service continues to grow with the addition of new technologies, devices and equipment, which all require electricity.

CUC’s Control Centre is the central point for supervision and control of electricity generation and the transmission and distribution systems. It was upgraded and completed in 2020.

To manage the grid, system operators closely monitor and control the flow of electricity to safeguard grid stability and power quality. If the demand for electricity and the maximum able to be supplied were to become unbalanced, it could lead to fluctuations in the frequency and voltage and cause outages.

Voltage fluctuations means there can be damage to electrical equipment, which can impact sensitive electronics and harm the grid infrastructure, which can ultimately lead to power outages.

To prevent these issues, grid system operators utilise advanced monitoring to continuously adjust electricity output via the multiple generating units at CUC’s North Sound Road Power Plant and soon via the Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) at CUC’s substations to match realtime changes in total consumer demand.

Did you know that Grand Cayman uses the most energy in the evenings as the sun is setting and solar is not available? That is one reason why large-scale solar HAS TO BE paired with storage solutions for our renewable energy future. CUC spends a lot of time analyzing and attempting to predict how much the Cayman population will grow and how much electricity all households and organisations will use to forecast the electricity load requirements.

Renewable Energy is the future and CUC is committed to giving Caymanians a future that they deserve.