TWO large power breakdowns that affected huge swathes of the country have occurred within a period of 10 days.

In both cases, the restoration of power took many hours. And in both cases the cause of the breakdown lay in the Guddu thermal power station and its transmission lines.

Guddu is one of the oldest power plants in the country, and has three large transmission lines that feed its output to Punjab, Sindh and Balochistan.

Take a look: Resumption of power supply underway: K-Electric

All of Balochistan’s power comes from here, and a large amount of the power consumed in Sindh is also generated in Guddu. Given its importance in our power grid, by virtue of its power-generation capacity and central location in transmission, it is sad to see the plant and its transmission lines sinking into a deplorable state of disrepair.

A few years ago, an explosion at the plant occurred in its gas pipelines, again shutting it down and causing a massive power outage. The excuse being given this time is heavy fog, which supposedly caused the line that connects the plant with a grid station at Dadu to trip, and then hampered the movement of restoration teams.

In a sense, the ageing plant and its transmission infrastructure are a perfect metaphor for the advanced state of disrepair of our power infrastructure and the outdated control systems being used to operate it.

For instance, it is astonishing to think that our transmission system cannot handle much more than 15,000MW and that it is laid out in a way that causes severe bottlenecks at critical junctions such as Guddu.

It is also astonishing to note that fog can cause a massive transmission line to trip, and that the tripping can then cascade through the entire provincial transmission system, shutting down the country’s largest city for the better part of the day.

The repeated breakdowns are a powerful reminder that our power crisis does not stem from a lack of generation capacity alone, but a poor transmission system, as well as woefully outdated systems to manage potential breakdowns and not allow their consequences to affect the entire system.

It is high time we tackled the problems plaguing the power sector in a holistic manner rather than remedying each defect on its own in an ad hoc fashion.

Until then, we can only hope that breakdowns of this sort are not going to become a regular feature of our lives the way load-shedding has come to be.

Published in Dawn December 23th , 2014