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Demand-supply gap to blame for grid failure


Published : 06 Oct 2022 10:27 PM

An imbalance between demand and supply in the eastern region of Bangladesh was behind the failure of the national power grid two days ago, sending major areas of the country into blackout for about seven hours, said State Minister for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Nasrul Hamid. 

“However, it would take some more days to identify the exact reason behind the failure of the national power grid,” he added. 

Nasrul Hamid on Thursday told reporters while briefing them at his ministry at the Secretariat.

He said initially it was found that when there was a deficit of power created in the east side and surplus in the west side of the county, the transmission system tripped leading to the grid failure. Automation is the only option to avoid such disasters.

"The incident will be a warning for us for the upcoming days. We are trying to go to an automation process soon and we have already started it," he added.

In a written statement, the state minister said that there was a power shortage in the eastern region around 2pm on Tuesday and the western region was generating excess power. 

Western region supplied 1,100 megawatts of electricity to the eastern region. During that time, two 230 KV circuits in Ashuganj and Sirajganj and two circuits in Ghorashal tripped leading to the grid failure, he added.

But no physical damage happened in the grid, the state minister said. 

He said a probe committee of Power Grid Company of Bangladesh (PGCB) was working on it while another committee from Power Division would also be formed soon. PGCB committee report is likely to l come in 7 days.

Referring to the recent statement made by Iqbal Hasan Mahmud Tuku, a member of BNP's standing committee, Nasrul said, "How does he [Tuku] know that such [power grid failure] incidents will happen again in the future? 

"We don't know for sure if any political links are responsible for the national grid failure. We are investigating the matter." 

Nasrul Hamid, however, admitted that the development of the Power Grid Company of Bangladesh (PGCB) was not possible in due time owing to Covid-19 pandemic.

“We could not implement many PGCB projects due to the Covid-19 situation. We have been two years behind the implementation schedule”, he said. We hope, within the next two years we will be able to complete the automation project and then chances of such grid failure will be slim,” he added.

Following the grid failure, all power plants tripped one after another and electricity supply went off in Dhaka, Chittagong, Sylhet, Barisal, and Mymensingh divisions on Tuesday.

Only a few districts in the Rangpur division were out of the power failure, said a top official of PGCB.

PGCB officials said the country's power supply demand was relatively lower at around 8500MW on Tuesday as the weather was not hot.

Bangladesh's biggest incident of national power grid failure happened on 1 November in 2014 when the entire country was without power for 17 hours.

Multiple probe bodies have been formed to investigate the matter and identify the exact cause behind the power outage.