The government has formed two committees to investigate the national power grid failure that caused six major power plants to trip on Saturday, affecting millions in southern, south-western and central Bangladesh amidst a heatwave.
This was the second national grid failure in 46 days as the first one occurred over an electrical fault recorded 65km off the critical Aminbazar power sub-station, which saw one of its key聽 transformers get burned for 12 hours on March 11, affecting thousands of residents in the capital Dhaka.
The power and energy ministry said that the fault was triggered by a short circuit occurring 25km off the Gopalganj sub-station.
鈥榃e describe it as a transient fault,鈥� said BM Mizanul Hassan, chief engineer, system operation, Power Grid Bangladesh, in short PGCB.
Transient fault refers to a very briefly lasting electrical problem that may occur for any trifling reasons, including a leaf or a thread, blown by the wind, settling down on the power line, causing a momentary flame, explained PGCB officials.
The 400KV power line that suffered the fault handled power supply from the six base-load power plants. Four of the plants are coal-fired power plants鈥�1,320MW Rampal, 1,320MW Payra, 1,320MW Patuakhali and 307MW Barishal power plants, and two gas-based power plants鈥�225MW Bhola-I and 225MW Bhola-II.
The Aminbazar sub-station is the final entry point of about 1,000MW of power to Dhaka.
As many as 21 districts, including 15 in the south-western zone, which were in the middle of a heatwave that saw temperature exceed 37C on Saturday, went completely without power supply at 5:45pm.
The West Zone Power Distribution Company鈥檚 managing director Mohammad Haider Ali said that 15 districts remained out of power supply for 12 minutes before they could restart the supply in alternative ways.
The outage lasted until 8:00pm at places.
The power and energy ministry said that the tripping caused a shortage of 2,277MW of electricity.聽
In a briefing at his office on Sunday afternoon, power and energy adviser Muhammad Fouzul Kabir Khan announced the formation of an eight-member body to probe the grid failure.
Interrupted by the transient fault halfway through near Gopalganj, the flow of electricity, generated from those six power plants, started to head towards Khulna through a 230KV power line, resulting in an overload and leading to the power plants鈥� shutdown, PGCB officials said.
The power supply worth 1,000MW was supposed to pass through the Gopalganj and the Aminbazar power stations towards Dhaka.
The PGCB also formed a five-member committee to investigate the incident in three days.
The Rampal coal power plant could not resume power supply to the national grid until noon on Sunday. Authorities said in the morning that the power plant started operation and was expected to resume its supply of power to the grid soon.
Authorities at the Payra power plant said that their plant started to supply power immediately after the grid was restored around 7:00pm on Saturday.
The Patuakhali power plant, which resumed operation on Sunday morning, reported some minor damage in their machines due to the grid failure. The overall assessment of the damage was still going on.
In a rather rare directive, the power and energy adviser asked authorities to take steps to broadcast through television any future blackouts, noting that he was not officially informed about the latest blackout.
The directive said that the adviser was not informed about Saturday鈥檚 metro rail service disruption caused by the power supply problem.
The PGCB officials, meanwhile, have described the Aminbazar sub-station running at its full capacity without any backup support as a highly vulnerable situation.聽
The occurrence of the Aminbazar sub-station fire despite grid collapsing left the PGCB engineers surprised, underlining serious issues lying with the transmission system.聽
Grid collapse itself is a defence mechanism in the transmission system mainly to prevent overheating of equipment in an event of disruption or sudden fluctuation in power supply. The collapse is meant to prevent fire.
The March grid collapse prompted authorities to reduce electricity generation at Payra and Rampal power plants.
Bangladesh鈥檚 current installed power generation capacity is over 27,566MW, about half of which remains idle mainly because of two reasons鈥攆uel crisis and poor power supply infrastructure.
On Sunday at 3:00pm, the PGCB reported 276MW of load shedding against a demand of 15,050MW.
The unreliable national grid has led to the building of an additional captive power generation capacity of 2,800MW operated by industries to meet own demand.
Earlier in October 2023, the Aminbazar sub-station saw one of its transformers explode, leading to outage in Dhaka due to the grid collapse.
Exactly a year ago in 2022, the national power grid collapsed, causing outages in four divisions for up to 10 hours.
There were two other occasions of grid collapse after 2014 the causes of which were never known beyond doubt.
