MERC appoints 3-member panel to conduct probe into Mumbai power outage

The Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission (MERC) on Thursday said a three-member committee will conduct an inquiry into last week's power outage which had plunged parts of the financial capital into darkness for up to 14 hours.

The high-level committee has been given three months' time to submit its report, MERC said in an order, adding the same can be extended if so sought by the panel.

The committee will be chaired by retired bureaucrat and former additional chief secretary of Maharashtra S K Goel, and includes C Ramakrishna (formerly with the Central Electricity Authority) and Faruk A S Kazi, head of the department of electrical engineering at city-based VJTI.

A bench of senior member Mukesh Khullar and member (legal) I M Bohari passed the order after hearing all the stakeholders in the matter as part of the suo motu hearing undertaken by MERC to analyse the outage.

MERC had earlier sought statements from the stakeholders, including power generation and distribution companies, and put up a few additional questions to them on Wednesday and gave them time to reply.

The commission, which has expressed its concern over the outage, will go to the root cause of the problem and is expected to pass directions in a day or two after perusing all the statements on record.

Terms of reference for the committee include doing a root cause analysis to understand reasons for the grid failure, analysis of system restoration efforts undertaken by distribution and generation companies, and to give recommendations to prevent recurrence of a similar event in the future, as per the order.

Last Saturday, MERC had moved suo motu on the outage issue, seeking replies from all the stakeholders and announced that the hearing will take place on Wednesday.

The commission had said it has received a preliminary report about the grid failure from the Maharashtra State Load Dispatch Centre (MSLDC) explaining the antecedent conditions, sequence of events, affected load and status of recovery of the system.

In the preliminary report, MSLDC has stated that the detailed report will be submitted after thorough analysis of the occurrence and collection of exact data from all the stakeholders,MERCsaid, asking it to submit the same by Monday evening.

It has also got preliminary reports from Tata Power (generation) and Adani Electricity Mumbai (distribution), but other transmission and distribution licensees and users have not submitted the details.

At present, the state-run MSETCL and private sector Tata Power are in a blame game over what led to the major power outage which took over 14 hours to resolve.

MSETCL says the 'islanding system' could not be triggered because Tata's generation started very late, while the private sector firm blames a cascading tripping of circuits for the fault.

The commission is understood to have told all stakeholders not to indulge in any mudslinging and to focus efforts on ensuring that there is no such re-occurrence.