On 9 January 2021 around 11:50 pm, all major cities of Pakistan faced a major breakdown of electricity. All cities including capital of Pakistan (Islamabad) also faced a blackout.
By Sayyed Shehzer Abbas
Power minister Omer Ayyub explained the reason of outage in a tweet “electricity in the country was due to sudden drop in frequency of power transmission system from 50 to 0 in less than a second”, which is also known as cascade.
The next morning minister Omer Ayub Khan talked to press and said the blackout, was caused by the technical fault in Guddu power plant, situated in southern Pakistan. He further said that the fault, tripped the transmission system nationwide, which caused the force shut down of power plants across the country. He also said that “Our teams are still working in the Guddu area to investigate the reason that caused the fault, but heavy for is making their job difficult” he said it could take few hours to stabilize the entire system.
After some time, internet connectivity also faced problems due to outage of electricity. After this dark night, power was restored in major cities and towns by Sunday evening. Omer Ayyub stated in a tweet that electric power supply was fully restored to the grid stations of Peshawar (Pesco) that were impacted, tweet also said that grid stations operation teams had remained busy in restoration.
Meanwhile, the K-Electrics (Karachi Electrics), said that electricity was back to most parts of Karachi by Sunday evening. KE stated that “Since 12am last night, KE team have been working to restore power rapidly to affected parts”. KE also added that its transmission and distribution networks were restored along with power generations from KE’s Bin Qasim plant and IPPs.
“By late evening, supplies from the national grid were also resumed through existing interconnection points with K-Electric. Most parts of Karachi have been energized already, while teams are available to address any individual customer complaints received at its 118-call center,”.