Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — With only two land surveyors on island, the American Samoa Power Authority has included in it’s apprenticeship program in New Zealand — a land surveyor apprenticeship, says ASPA acting executive director Wallon Young at last week’s cabinet meeting.

Young provided brief updates on ASPA’s ongoing work and one item is their apprenticeship program, which he says that ASPA is in the process of hiring 8 to 10 apprentices.

He explained this program is slightly different from the one at the American Samoa Community College. “We will be sending these 8 to 10 apprentices to New Zealand, it’s a fully funded program,” he said noting that the program covers “very specialized areas” — electrical engineering, renewable energy and two apprentices will be studying land surveying.

“As you know we only have two land surveyors on island [but] there’s a lot of work to be done. So we have decided that two apprentices will be studying land surveying,” he said.

He also spoke about the drop in electric rates, which continue to decrease and ASPA projects rates would drop again next month. He said the drop is 7 cents per kilowatt hour, and while it may not sound much — every cent drop per kilowatt hour represents a $1.2 million drop in costs for ASPA.

As for the 7 cents, he said, that’s a $7.4 million drop for the electric division, which had a  budget at $48 million, but is now down to $40 million.

(In a brief statement more than two weeks ago, ASPA announced the “20% drop in fuel surcharge rate” for the August 2020 billing, saying the drop in the cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for the August 2020 bill is due to the continued drop in the price of fuel over the last couple of months. See Samoa News edition Aug. 13th for details.)

For ASPA’s two new generators that arrived on island two weeks ago and have since been taken to the Tafuna Power Plant, he said the generators are valued at $3 million each and were paid for from local funds.

“Normally there’s a surcharge to fund these generators or a loan, but in this case, it’s funded locally,” he said.

Regarding standby generators, Young said ASPA is in the process of purchasing standby generators for its water wells. In the past, when there were cyclones and electricity went out, the water was affected as well.

“We want to cover those weaknesses in our system, so we’ll be ordering stand-by generators and installing them before the end of the year,” he said, noting that ASPA has already drilled 4 new water wells and it’s in the process of connecting these wells to the system and that will increase the supply of water and alleviate some of the low water pressure problems in some areas.

As for street lights, he said that after multiple delays, street lights were to arrive on island this past weekend and “we have plans in place already to install street lights in the next two to three months.”

Regarding ASPA’s wind and solar projects, he said, “We have come to the point that we need engineers on the ground. We are very mindful of the restrictions especially from the U.S. but we have come to a point where, engineers need to be on island.”

Flights between Honolulu and Pago Pago remain suspended through the month of September, due to the spike in the number of COVID-19 cases in Hawaii and other US states.