ISLAMABAD: The government has responded to public outrage at nationwide blackout that began on January 24 by suspending two government officials responsible for overseeing the state-owned power grid.
National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) Managing Director Tahir Mehmood and National Power Control Centre (NPCC) General Manager Muhammad Saleem have been suspended from their duties, ostensibly because they were responsible for the power breakdown, though it is unclear exactly how they could have prevented an outage that began with an act of sabotage. The suspensions were confirmed by the spokesperson of the water and power ministry, who added that an inquiry had been initiated against both officials. The suspensions follow an inquiry into the causes of the power outage that blamed both officials for the blackout.
On the night of January 24, a group of Baloch separatists attacked power pylons in Notal, a small town in Naseerabad district in Balochistan. That attack set off a cascading effect on the national grid, triggering a nationwide blackout, with more than 80% of the country without power for the next several hours. The cascading effect is a safety mechanism built into the electricity grid as a means of protecting the infrastructure against unsafe variations in voltage, such as the kind that was triggered by the Notal attack.
Earlier this month, the government suspended six officials, including the petroleum secretary and two officials from the government-owned Pakistan State Oil (PSO) over their alleged failures in controlling the effects of the acute petrol shortage that hit most of Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. While this pattern has been repeated with the power crisis, no minister has faced any threats to their job over the energy crisis, which many experts have attributed to a confused government policy, including the government’s own failure to appoint permanent heads of state-owned power companies.
According to water and power ministry officials, National Engineering Services Pakistan (Nespak) submitted its report to the ministry on last week’s nationwide blackout, in which it attributed the Notal attack as responsible for tripping the grid. However, it then blamed the two suspended officials for failing to prevent the grid from doing what it is designed to do.
“After the 200 kilovolt (kV) transmission line tripped, it was the responsibility of the NTDC and the NPCC to take measures to avoid the closure of the entire power system,” claimed ministry officials, referring to NESPAK’s findings.
