Committee formed to investigate power trip

The West Bengal government has nominated officials from the West Bengal State Electricity Transmission Company Ltd(WBSETCL) to a committee formed by CESC to investigate the cause for the massive power shortage in the city, yesterday.

The committee will also come up with remedial measures in the face of a similar situation in the future.

“CESC has formed a committee to look into the matter and we have appointed experts from our transmission company to work with the CESC team. A lot of our power lines are inter-linked and so a technical failure on a CESC line could easily affect the state transmission and distribution companys' network,” said Sunil Mitra, state power secretary.

He added that while the city's system load is around 1400 MW in the afternoon, CESC generated around 975MW,and therefore, it drew power from the state generation company.

The committee has submitted an initial report to the state government outlining the reason behind yesterday's 'black-out' as technical equipment failure and a detailed report would take around two week's time.

Four power generating stations of CESC at Budge Budge, Titagarh, Kashipur and Southern had tripped simultaneously last afternoon crippling metro and rail networks, hospitals, ATMs, hotels, hitting water supply apart from residential blocks across the city.

A CESC spokesperson admitted that this was indeed an unprecedented event at least in the last 20 years.

"Our power generation is normal today, but we are working on coming up with remedial measures in case of a similar situation in the future", he added.

Mitra admitted that the supply would be slightly short of the overall anticipated demand today.