Eastern, North Eastern grids also collapse

The collapse of the Northern Grid on Tuesday had a cascading effect on the Eastern and North-Eastern grids which, too tripped.

The West Bengal government appeared to be pointing fingers at a diversion of 450Mw to the Northern grid yesterday as the main reason behind the outage that affected West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa and Sikkim.

“We will investigate the reason behind the Eastern Grid collapse, but the causes of the collapse are overdrawal and over-diversion,” West Bengal Power Minister Manish Gupta said.

Though the units of RP-Sanjiv Goenka group’s power utility, CESC, that supply power to Kolkata, were the only ones functioning, it was inadequate to meet the city’s demand of 1,600Mw, as all other state utilities tripped.

LOAD PROFILE OF CRISIS REGIONS  (Apr-Jun ‘12)
	Peak demand	Peak availability	Deficit (%)
Eastern
Total	17,347	16,056	7.4
Bihar	2,313	1,802	22.1
Odisha	3,968	3,458	12.9
Jharkhand	1,088	995	8.5
DVC	2,513	2,409	4.1
West Bengal	7,322	7,249	1.0
Sikkim	95	95	0.0
Andaman Nicobar	48	48	0.0
North-eastern
Total	2,043	1,934	5.3
Arunachal Pradesh	116	114	13.3
Assam	1,186	1,093	7.8
Manipur	116	113	2.6
Meghalaya	275	269	2.2
Mizoram	65	64	2.0
Nagaland	100	98	1.7
Tripura	185	183	1.5
Figures in Mw; DVC: Damodar Valley Corporation (covers some states in the east) Source: CEA

Around 500 suburban, eastern and south eastern trains had come to a standstill in the afternoon. “We are trying to run some of the trains with diesel engines, but not all trains can be run on diesel. This is a serious situation,” West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said. She announced a holiday in the wake of the power situation.

The Kolkata metro, however, remained unaffected, courtesy CESC. Around 200 miners, stuck in the underground mines of Eastern Coalfields in Bardhaman, were rescued later.

Large parts of Odisha also went without power. The total power availability in the state supply system dropped sharply to 1,200 Mw, less than half the usual availability of 2,600 Mw. As an emergency measure, the state borrowed power from the Western and Southern grids.

“While restoring the Northern Grid on Tuesday, a fault was detected again, which spread to the North-Eastern Grid. The cascading effect was felt by the Eastern grid,” said Hemant Sharma, outgoing chairman and managing director of Grid Corporation of Odisha.

“All thermal power plants in the state were forced to shut due to the snag, while hydro generation plants were told to step up production,” said P K Pradhan, commercial director of Gridco. While eight of the 30 districts faced complete blackout, the supply was partially affected in other areas. The North-Eastern grid collapse affected Assam in a major way. Two power stations — Namrup and Lakwa — providing close to 180 Mw were the only power stations to be operational in the afternoon.