Major outage hits country

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The country yet again suffered electricity blackouts for hours yesterday due to national grid failure.

Power Development Board (PDB) sources said technical glitches in a transmission line at Ashuganj at around 11:45am caused local power units to shut down and soon led to cascading effect on almost all units across the country.

It was the second massive outage in a month after the national grid failed on November 16 in the wake of Cyclone Sidr leaving the nation without electricity throughout the day.

Electricity started coming back on after over two hours. By 10 last night, the PDB was selectively supplying around 1,800 megawatts against a peak demand of 3,650 MW. Of this, Greater Dhaka was getting 770 MW.

Some areas in the city with a demand of around 1,200 MW on the weekend while a large portion of the country, however, did not have power till filing of this report at around 12:00am.

Earlier in the evening, the power development authorities said they were hoping to supply around 3,000 MW by 10:00pm and thus bring the power situation back to normal.

They said power plants at Ghorashal, Meghnaghat and Haripur were preparing to start generation. But it might take a few hours to bring them on line.

Business activities were severely disrupted due to the power failure that cut off water supply and affected other public utilities.

Hospitals and clinics in the city and elsewhere in the country struggled to cope with the blackouts. Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) officials said they only had the major operations done with the help of generator. But attending other patients properly was quite difficult.

Commuters had hard time finding transports yesterday evening. There were a few CNG-run three-wheelers or cabs on the road as most of them had to queue up for hours for fuel.

With the experience of last month’s daylong blackout fresh in memory, people were frantically calling PDB, Dhaka Electric Supply Authorities (Desa) and other power distribution bodies as well as the media houses, enquiring about the situation.

The power ministry has asked PDB member Transmission and Distribution to find out what caused the grid failure. A team was already off to Ashuganj from where the outage originated. Besides, a committee that was formed to probe the blackout of November 16 was asked to find out the causes here too.

A PDB source said, “It’s still not clear to us why the grid failed. However, we do know that it all started at Ashuganj. The plants there were the first to trip and were soon followed by the plants elsewhere.”

Ashuganj is a major power generation area having eight units. Five of the units were producing over 575 MW when the national grid began to have trouble at around 11:45am. Three were already kept shut for maintenance work.

Our Brahmanbaria correspondent adds: A 35-MW power unit at Ashuganj got back in operation in the afternoon. But the other ones could not resume functioning till filing of the report at 7:00pm.

Had the blackout not taken place, the PDB would have supplied a maximum of 3,430 MW yesterday, leaving still a deficit of around 200 MW. This is because several power plants have lately been undergoing overhaul.

The power demand shoots up to 5,200 MW during peak hours in most of the times, while the PDB can supply up to 4200 MW in best of its times. Last month’s cyclone had damaged some transmission and distribution lines leading to one of the worst blackouts in the country’s history.

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