Wapda clueless about cause of outage: More loadshedding likely
By Khaleeq Kiani
ISLAMABAD, Sept 25: At least three teams on Monday began probing into Sunday’s country-wide power breakdown amid fears that consumers will face load-shedding for the next couple of days in the absence of any contingency plan, officials said.
Background discussions with officials directly looking after power restoration suggest that although the precise cause of the fault has not been identified, it has been established beyond doubt that there was lack of long-term planning, inadequacy of reserve transmission and absence of a contingency plan to cope with such an eventuality. According to Wapda, it was a total collapse of the system whose precise cause was not yet known.
Wapda sources said that the delay in the completion of two 500-kilovolt transmission lines was the main reason for the prolonged breakdown across the country. Had the Muzaffargarh-Gatti and Rawat-Lahore transmission lines (both capable of handling 500-kv) been completed in time, the electricity load could have been shifted immediately. There was no extra line available and the normal line faced technical problems.
The Muzaffargarh-Gatti line being built by a Chinese firm was scheduled for completion about two years ago but was still not ready. The Rawat-Lahore line has also been running behind schedule. An official said most of the 220-kv transmission system had alternate arrangements but more than 3,000-km of 500-kv line had no back-up lines except a few in the southern region where most of thermal power stations belonging to Wapda and IPPs were located.
The officials said that the ministry of water and power and Wapda had been asking the finance ministry to help finance the alternate 500-kv lines in the north where hydel projects like Mangla, Tarbela and Ghazi Barotha (with a combined power production of about 6000 megawatts) were located. They said that the government had also been told in advance that sophisticated automatic switching capacitors and equipment were necessary to avoid such eventualities but a restriction of self-financing on Wapda delayed such projects. There are also indications that a Tarbela unit that had been repaired massively about 20 years ago might be the root cause.
They said two IPPs, two Wapda thermal units and Chashma nuclear power plant (Chashnupp) were expected to start full production by midnight on Monday and would reduce Tuesday’s peak shortfall to about 600-700MW.
Wapda engineers took 10 hours to energise the whole transmission network in contrast to a similar shutdown in 2001 when it took about 16 hours. However, a number of generators still required repair and a few of them may take even a couple of days. Interestingly, the power demand increased to about 11,500MW on Monday afternoon and going up further to about 12,500MW at the peak Iftar time, thus leaving a generation shortfall of about 1,000MW.
The sources said that the Barotha-Gatti transmission line that originally indicated signs of a fault after the breakdown did not show any technical problem when it was re-energised on Sunday night.
