Tags:
Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, JANUARY 2: Virtually the entire northern India, from Jammu and Kashmir to Uttar Pradesh, faced its worst ever blackout in the last five years as seven states went without power for nearly sixteen hours since around four in the morning on Tuesday. While there was virtually a complete blackout till around noon, power supply was restored in parts in a staggered fashion. Though Uion Power Minister Suresh Prabhu said that 60-70 per cent of power generation was restored by 5 pm, and that services would be fully restored by 10 pm, consumers across the states of J&K, Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Himachal, Rajasthan and the union territory of Chandigarh complained of power outages till late in the night.
And, making a dramatic change from previous blackouts, power supplies in the capital were cut, though briefly, even to VVIP areas such as the Prime Minister’s residence and the Rashtrapati Bhavan, for around 20 minutes. Power supplies to Lutyens Bungalow Zone, where the country’s powerful politicians live, however, remained cut till late in the afternoon.
With power supplies off since early morning, the day began with chairmen of the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), Power Grid Corporation (PGCIL) huddled in meetings with their engineers. The emergency meetings continued through much of the day, and an emergency meeting of the Cabinet was called around noon to discuss the issue.
While Power Minister Suresh Prabhu chose not to dwell on actions taken on previous reports (after similar power outages), he announced another inquiry committee to find out what happened, and to fix responsibility — the committe will be headed by CEA chairman R N Srivastava.
Though there are conflicting reports on how the grid collapsed, sources said the problem began with Punjab over-drawing from the grid in the early hours of the morning, resulting in the grid frequency falling much below the recommended 50 Hertz. With other production centres, such as the Bhakra Beas Management Board (BBMB) not able to augment power quickly enough (there were faults in the supply line), the grid frequency kept falling, and within the next 15 minutes or so, the entire grid collapsed.
Since frequencies over the entire grid are monitored around the clock by the Regional Load Despatch Control Centre, ironically, this means RLDCC `slept’ through the crisis! Alternately, they were not able to get other centres to augment supply or reduce demand by de-linking quickly enough.
By 4:39 am, the 400 KV Panki-Muradnagar, Panki-Obra and Panki-Kanpur transmission lines collapsed. With the other centres not able to delink, power surged in neighbouring lines — by 4.45 am, power stations at Anta, Auraiya, Singrauli, Dadri, Rihand and Anpara shut down. (A loss of around 15,500 MW of power took place as a result of this collapse.)
Interestingly, different authorities gave different explanations for the break down of the northern grid. Power Minister Suresh Prabhu put this down to a “mismatch between demand for power by states and its generation” and also said that “for the safety of the grid, greed for power would have to stop.” PGCIL chairman R P Singh said, on the other hand, it was equipement failure which was the root cause of the crisis today. “The circuit breaker supplying power from the BBMB tripped 14 times when we tried to restore power to NTPC’s Badarpur and Dadri stations, which created more problems,” Singh said. CEA chairman R N Srivastava said that “a series of trippings could have led to the massive collapse of the northern grid. It is not even known if the relays were properly synchronised or not.”
After spending the whole day in the restoration exercise, the enquiry committee begins work on finding the cause of the break-down tomorrow. The CEA chairman has called an emergency meeting of all the power utility chiefs – NTPC, NHPC, PGCIL among others to begin enquiring into the break down.
