Power has been restored in most of Bangladesh, a day after the impoverished, energy-starved nation was plunged into a nationwide blackout.
THE outage happened after a transmission line from neighbouring India failed, officials said.
The blackout swept across Bangladesh at noon on Saturday after the transmission line experienced a “technical glitch” that led to a cascade of failures throughout the national power grid, with power plants and substations shutting down.
After an evening spent in the dark, most of the residents of Dhaka, the capital of more than 10 million people, got electricity back on by 1am on Sunday, said a control room official of the Dhaka Power Distribution Company.Power was restored in other major cities too, but it was not clear how many people were still without electricity.
Tawfiq-e-Elahi Chowdhury, energy adviser to Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, said late on Saturday that he expected the supply would be back to normal by Sunday afternoon.
Dhaka’s hospitals and the international airport continued to operate after the blackout Saturday with emergency generators. But many offices normally open had to send their employees home.
Power outages blamed on inefficient and dated grid infrastructure, as well as poor management, are common in Bangladesh, though Saturday’s blackout was the country’s worst since 2007, when a powerful cyclone that killed about 3,500 people knocked out the national grid for several hours.
Meanwhile, Bangladeshi and Indian electricity companies have signed a deal to build a $1.5bn (£950m) plant to help address Bangladesh’s chronic power shortages.
The coal-fired plant will produce 1300 megawatts of electricity, about one fifth of the country’s daily needs.
Bangladesh relies on old gas-fired plants for its power and experiences daily electricity shortfalls.
However environmentalists say the proposed site for the plant is too close to famous Sundarbans forests.
They argue that discharge from the power plant, like sulphur dioxide and fly ash, will have disastrous consequences for the fauna and flora of the mangrove swamps – a Unesco World Heritage site.
“If excess pressure is put on the [Poshu] river, that means less water for Sundarbans, which will mean that it will have a definite negative impact on the forests,” environmentalist Rizwana Hossain told the BBC.
However, officials say they will take steps to mitigate the impact of the planned plant on the environment.
Sunday’s deal was signed in Dhaka by Bangladesh’s Power Development Board and India’s National Thermal Power Corporation.
The Bangladeshi government says it needs to build more stations to meet the country’s growing demand for electricity.
Erratic supplies have been blamed for hampering industrial production and economic growth.
Last November Bangladesh signed a deal with Russia for two new nuclear plants, which should produce 1,000 megawatts each when they come online in 2018. – EIN News
