Power supply restored after major breakdown
ISLAMABAD (NNI): Power supply has been restored in various parts of the country after several hours of major break-down of the national grid.
According to reports, power break-down occurred in almost all big cities of the country including Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Quetta, Karachi and Kashmir last night.
Minister of State for Water and Power Abid Sher Ali said in a statement that high power transmission line was blown up by terrorists in Naseerabad area of Balochistan.
Abid Sher Ali said that terrorists wanted to paralyse routine life in the country but government would ensure security of electricity installations across the country.
A spokesman of National Transmission and Despatch Company says 5200MW electricity has been restored in the national grid system.
In a statement, he said more electricity would be brought back to the system by 12 noon.
Power supply has been restored to at least 95 percent areas of Karachi, according to a spokesman of K-Electric. He said nominal technical faults will be removed soon in the remaining 5 percent areas.
Earlier, parts of the country including Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, federal capital Islamabad, and some areas of Punjab plunged into complete darkness.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took notice of the power breakdown and directed to restore the power supply at the earliest.
Five hours after the blackout, the power was completely restored in KPK includingPeshawar and efforts are afoot to for phased restoration in Islamabad, Karachi andLahore.
“The power outage was caused after an extra high-tension wire tripped, K-Electric spokesman Usama Qureshi told media soon after the power failure.
Qureshi also clarified that K-Electric was not responsible for the breakdown. “We have reports that entire Sindh is facing the blackout,” Qureshi added.
According to sources in Ministry of Water & Ministry, engineers were racing against time to fix the crisis.
Sources in National Transmission & Despatch Company (NTDC) said that this chain reaction or somewhat domino effect of ‘power failure’ was actually set into motion after Balochistan’s sprawling Uch-1 and Uch-2 Power Stations tripped offline at around 11:56.
They also added it was not the first time that both the plants had gone down triggering nationwide failure.
Experts say tripping or power-system protection is aimed at protection of electrical power systems from faults through the isolation of faulted parts from the rest of the electrical network.
The objective of a protection scheme is to keep the power system stable by isolating only the components that are under fault, whilst leaving as much of the network as possible still in operation. NNI