Bangladesh today said the worst nationwide power outage in recent years was not caused by a glitch in a transmission line from India but was the result of internal technical problems.
“There was no problem from India’s side, the 400 MW line had no problem, either. There was a transmission problem on our side,” Finance Minister AMA Muhith said after a meeting with the power division officials.
“Our transmission and distribution system is very poor which caused the blackout,” Muhith was quoted as saying by bdnews24.
Officials earlier had said the power outage happened after India-Bangladesh power inter-connecter experienced a “technical glitch” leading to failures throughout the national grid, with power plants and substations shutting down.
Over 12-hour blackout left the capital Dhaka and other cities looking like ghost towns. Even Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s office and presidential palace plunged into darkness.
But Muhith said the 400 KV line which pumps 450 MW power to Bangladesh’s national grid through western Bheramara interconnector system should not be blamed for the outage.
Officials also said the tripping of the interconnector station, was too much for the “under frequency relay” system to prevent the blackout.
Bangladesh last year started importing electricity from India through the 400-kilovolt transmission line, which runs from Baharampur in West Bengal to the town of Bheramara in southwestern Bangladesh.
Former director general of Power Cell and leading electricity expert BD Rahmatullah told PTI that “over the past years Bangladesh put on its most efforts to increase generation volume caring little about the transmission and distribution systems and the Saturday’s debacle was the outcome of the poor transmission system”.
“Generation, transmission and distribution systems are equally important. But 60 percent of the total investment was poured on the generation alone in the past one decade,” he said.
Experts said when there is a sudden failure of a power generation source, the under frequency relay is supposed to shut off equal amount of electricity supply to localities and the system prevents other power plants from shutting down in a domino effect due to the abrupt supply shortfall.
But the circuit failure in the Bheramara interconnector station on Saturday created a shortfall that affected some private power plants before the relay system could kick in.
“This caused a chain reaction among the power plants connected to the national grid,” said a Bangladesh Power Development Board official.
There are more than a hundred small, medium and large power plants connected to the grid.
They said the Bheramara station was only handling around 440 MW of power import at the time of the disaster, when the country’s power demand was 4400 MW which was just 10 percent of the demand.
Bangladesh would now need to put on its efforts to improve the transmission and distribution systems particularly because it was building several large power plants, like the 1,000 MW nuclear power plant in Rooppur, the 1,320 MW coal plant in Rampal, and the 1,200 MW coal plant in Matarbari.
“You won’t even get the international atomic energy authorities approval to run the nuclear plant once it is built unless the transmission and distribution system is developed to take the adequate power load,” energy expert Arun Karmakar told PTI.
Bangladesh, meanwhile, constituted a high-powered investigation committee to prepare a detailed technical report on national power grid collapse with Hasina herself overseeing the investigation.
Some of the major hospitals and the international airport continued to operate after the blackout Saturday with emergency generators.
Bangladesh is considered one of the lowest per capita electricity consumption rates in the world as more than a third of Bangladesh’s 166 million people still have no access to electricity, while the country often is able to produce only some of its 11,500-megawatt generation capacity.
The blackout was the country’s worst since a 2007 cyclone knocked out the national grid for 12 hours.
PTI