LAHORE: The country suffered on Thursday the third major power breakdown in the past four weeks.

“Thick fog and extreme weather conditions” led to tripping of 500Kv Guddu-Dadu transmission line at around 5.15am, as usual triggering domino impact in the transmission and generation system and plunging Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa into a complete darkness.

Sindh and Balochistan were partially affected, but by and large escaped the disaster if officials of the National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) are to be believed. “The Hubco, Jamshoro and Uch power stations continued operating as their transmission lines went into island mode, disconnecting themselves with the rest of the country because of internal safety gadgets,” says an NTDC official.

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However, the rest of the country was without power for six hours till the NTDC staff was able to restore lines, and hydel generation plants, which are relatively quick to restart, started coming back.

Sindh and Balochistan partially affected

The Ghazi-Barotha Project was first to come back at around 11am, followed by Mangla Dam at 11.06am and Tarbela Dam at 11.30am. All of them were producing around 2,500MW against 950MW when the disaster struck the system. But hydel component had begun receding as thermal generation started coming online and water restrictions, due to canal closure, taking effect by the evening.

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It took a few hours to substantially restore thermal units, which normally take six to eight hours to return. By the time of filing of this report, the NTDC had fully restored 500Kv and 220Kv lines and was in the process of restoring Muzaffargarh, Lal Pir and Guddu plants and it was hoped that all thermal units would come online by 10pm. The total generation by 8pm was around 7,000MW against normal supplies of 9,000MW these days.

“The recent breakdowns only exposed the fragility as well as pivotal position of the transmission system in the power sector,” says a former head of the Pakistan Electric Power Company.

Although the NTDC has added a few lines in the past few months, the repeated breakdowns only show the urgency with which parallel contingency lines are required for sustained health of the system. Unfortunately, the entire official attention has been riveted (for political reasons) on increasing generation and transmission is getting short-shrift for being a dry and technical subject. Fortunately, the NTDC in the past few years has developed all plans, projections and requirements of lines; it is time to dust them off and pursue those lines on an urgent basis.

Otherwise, the extreme weather conditions would continue testing the system and causing breakdowns. If three breakdowns in almost as many weeks cannot jolt the government out of its slumber about the health of transmission system, nothing else would, he concluded.

Published in Dawn, January 9th, 2015

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