LAHORE: Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have to face third power breakdown in a month as Sindh and Balochistan have also partially been affected.
Sources said that 500Kv Guddu-Dadu transmission line tripped due to thick fog and extreme weather conditions at around 5:15am.
An National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) official said that the Hubco, Jamshoro and Uch power stations continued operating as their transmission lines went into island mode, disconnecting themselves with the rest of the country because of internal safety gadgets.
However, the rest of the country was without power for six hours till the NTDC staff was able to restore lines, and hydel generation plants, which are relatively quick to restart, started coming back.
The Ghazi-Barotha Project was first to come back at around 11am, followed by Mangla Dam at 11.06am and Tarbela Dam at 11.30am. All of them were producing around 950MW against 2,500MW when the disaster struck the system.
It took a few hours to substantially restore thermal units, which normally take six to eight hours to return. By the time of filing of this report, the NTDC had fully restored 500Kv and 220Kv lines and was in the process of restoring Muzaffargarh, Lal Pir and Guddu plants and it was hoped that all thermal units would come online by 10pm. The total generation by 8pm was around 7,000MW against normal supplies of 9,000MW these days.
