Power situation may stabilise by midnight, Bipu hopes

After an eight-hour outage triggered by a collapse in the National Grid, power supply to different districts in Bangladesh including capital Dhaka has been restored.

Speaking with bdnews24.com at around 9:45pm on Saturday, State Minister for Power and Energy Nasrul Hamid Bipu expressed hope that the situation would stabilise within a few hours.

"Right now, 1500 megawatt electricity is being added to the National Grid. I hope the recovery will be complete by midnight."

The grid collapsed at around 11:30am on Saturday. The situation worsened when it tripped again in the afternoon due to a “hasty” restoration process.

On Saturday, the demand for power across Bangladesh was 6,600 MW. Only 700 MW was being supplied in the afternoon during the restoration process when the second collapse occurred.

The supply rate dropped to 200 MW after that, Power Secretary Monowar Hossain had said.

Government officials had said they would move slowly to restore the power supply and asked the people to be patient.

The minister had also said the restoration process was under way.

Later at around 7:30pm, power returned to various areas in the port city of Chittagong.

And at around 8pm, residents from Dhaka’s different areas including Banani, Badda, Khilkhet, Rampura, Mirpur and Gabtoli said electricity was restored in their houses.

Reports also said power was back on in many districts including Khulna, Sylhet, Rajshahi, Barisal, Kushtia, Brahmanbaria, Kishoreganj and Narsinghdi after the evening.

However, power outages hit some of those areas again soon after supply was restored the first time. Power returned to those areas within hours.

Electricity in Chittagong’s Kazir Deurhi, Askar Dighir Parh, Ghat Farhad Beg, Andarkilla and Jamal Khan was restored around 6pm, but the outage hit again an hour later.

Chittagong power division officials said they were rationing supply to different areas.

Senior Assistant Director of Power Development Board's (PDB) Chittagong zone, Md Moniruzzaman said they had resumed supply in the evening.

Raujan Thermal Power Plant Chief Engineer Swapan Chakrabarty told bdnews24.com that four out of five units of the plant had been generating electricity since 5pm.

The Hathazari Peaking Power Plant too started operating from evening. He added that another power plant at Dohazari was set to be operational.

“The situation will stabilise gradually once all the power plants start operating and increase power generation,” Chakrabarty said.

After the collapse in the afternoon, Dhaka and much of Bangladesh submerged in darkness in the evening as the available supply was inadequate to meet the demand.

At the time, State Minister Nasrul Hamid had said, "The recovery work is in progress. It (power restoration) will take time."

He said they had hastened the recovery process and had even recovered 700 megawatts of power.

The haste, however, caused the second grid failure. "We are now moving slowly," he said, adding: "We can't afford another failure now."