Karachi, 8th July, 2015: K-Electric’s management issued a detailed statement explaining the outage that occurred in Karachi and parts of Sindh and Balochistan on the eve of 7th of July.
According to KE’s statement, the first breakdown in Karachi occurred at around 9pm due to tripping in the 220 KV transmission line – affecting the generating units at KE’s Bin Qasim Power Station that caused an outage in many parts of Karachi.
KE’s management team and engineers worked all night to reboot, as per its standard operating processes and electricity had resumed in many pockets of the city at 1am.
However, as soon as Bin Qasim’s units were back online, tripping occurred in the supply system in Sindh at around 1am, which pulled down delivery not only in Karachi and also in parts of Balochistan.
Further outages also occurred in Hyderabad, Mirpurkhas, Jamshoro, Hub, Uthal, Bela and Vinder and this “cascading effect” compounded challenges.
Giving details, KE’s team said that the sudden disruption of supply technically tripped the entire system to which the power utility/generation companies of Karachi and Sind are connected.
KE’s CEO, Tayyab Tareen stated, “NTDC came back online early morning at around 5 am and by that time KE had gone into “Island Mode” and had started the revival of its own generating units”.
He added, “after the revival of NTDC’s 500 KV line, different areas of Karachi were back online within a reasonable span of time”.
KE’s media spokesperson also added, “We apologise to our valued consumers for the issues caused by this breakdown and assure the public at large that K-Electric has made every effort to rapidly resume service to them – with zeal and commitment and especially in challenging and unforeseen circumstances like these”.