Massive blackout: The reason and solution must be addressed

Some 60 per cent of the country witnessed a massive blackout for a few hours due to a collapse in the national grid. A total of 32 districts in Dhaka, Chattogram, Sylhet and Mymensingh division were completely without electricity for four to eight hours. Common people’s daily lives were greatly affected by this. Emergency services, including business, medical services, telecommunication and bank transactions were disrupted. Factories in many areas were closed down due to the blackout.

The blackout occurred on Tuesday, when the people of the Bengali Hindu community were celebrating their biggest religious festival, Durga Puja. However, all the rituals of the puja were completed without a hitch in the end. According to the sources in the Power Grid Company of Bangladesh (PGCB), the crisis started in the national grid on the eastern side of the Jamuna Bridge at 2.05pm. State minister for power and energy, Nasrul Hamid has said about forming probe bodies to identify the reasons behind the black out.

Executive director of PGCB, Mohammad Yakub Elahi Chowdhury said, 'We are initially assuming that one of the grid or power supply lines has tripped in Ghorashal. Another line overloaded causing that line to trip. As a result, there was a shortage of power supply in the grid in the eastern region.”

There can be various reasons behind the crisis in the national grid. However, when a crisis like this appears in a country’s national power grid, it is considered a planning problem.

But when such a disaster occurs in a country's national power grid, it is considered a planning problem and maintenance and management failure of the power sector. There is good reason to consider Tuesday's power outage the same.

For instance, any problem in load shedding management can also lead to grid failure. The flaws in the planning of the power sector comes to the fore when the question is raised as to why load-shedding has to be carried out to this extent despite the country having more power generation capacity than the demand.

We have always preferred imported energy for power generation. As a result, the country’s power sector has become dependent on imported energy. This import dependency has put the power sector at risk.

When the import had to be reduced due to the increase in the price of fuel oil in the international market, the power generation was reduced despite the production capacity. The issue of negligence on gas exploration and not stressing properly on gas extraction is clearly a major flaw in the planning of the energy sector.

It is essential to have a balance among power generation, transmission and distribution. It is unfortunate that, although the government had shown a great interest in constructing power plants, they were not so keen on repairing and modernising the transmission line. As a result, power crises have become somewhat common today.

The government forms one of more probe committees every time there is an accident. There was no exception this time as well. Considering the probe reports from these committees in previous incidents, we don’t have much space to be hopeful this time. In most of the cases, these committees blame technical flaws instead of people responsible for the problem. The reason behind the incident never comes out. If we want to keep our power supply management safe, we must address the reason behind the crisis on Tuesday. If we can take lessons from the Tuesday crisis, then it will be possible to avoid such crises in future. Instead of being self-satisfied with our increased power generation capacity, we should also have a proper planning for transmission and distribution