THE government’s promise to prevent power outages during sehri and iftar fell flat on its face on the very first day of the holy month. Half of Sindh plunged into darkness around 2:45am, and power did not return for many until the afternoon due to a ‘technical fault’ in the high-tension transmission line coming out of the grid station at Jamshoro. The outage cannot be said to have been caused by high humidity or soaring temperatures, since it occurred at night when humidity levels were not very high. Nor can it be blamed on K-Electric, since the line is owned and operated by Pepco, under the water and power ministry. This means the two favourite whipping boys of the ministry — weather and K-Electric — cannot be invoked as an excuse. Such high-profile ‘tripping’ of transmission lines have occurred in the past too, also in Sindh, on the junction around the Guddu thermal power station, in some cases plunging the entire country into darkness for prolonged periods. Following those episodes, the ministry successfully installed technology that prevented a fault in one section of the transmission line from cascading through the entire system and causing outages all over the country.

In this case, we are told that an event of some sort originated in the power plant operated by Hubco that travelled to the grid station at Jamshoro, triggering the outage. Only a detailed investigation will tell us what the exact reason was, but the point to note is how a single event can still cause such a massive area, including 76 grid stations of the Hyderabad Electric Supply Company, to fall at the same time. Also, the prolonged period of the outage points to technical incompetence. Is it too much to expect from the managers of our transmission system to ensure that technical faults have only a localised impact, and that re-energising the system not be such a Herculean feat taking nine hours or more to accomplish? To every technical problem there is a technical solution, and just as they were able to prevent transmission line events around the Guddu junction from cascading through the system by employing the correct technology, perhaps they can identify other junctions in the transmission system that pose similar hazards, and instal the required technology to prevent large swathes of the country from plunging into prolonged darkness. Surely this is not rocket science.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2017