Authorities have restored electricity supply to parts of several main Pakistani cities and work on power restoration is continuing on Sunday after a major fault at a thermal power plant caused a countrywide blackout, plunging millions into darkness.
Power across the South Asian country of 220 million people was abruptly cut late on Saturday because of a fault at the Guddu thermal power plant, sending the entire country into darkness, Energy Minister Omar Ayub Khan said.
\u201cAt 11:41pm [18:41 GMT] the fault occurred at the Guddu power plant, and in one second the [power] frequency which is normally at 49.5 Hertz it dropped [to zero],\u201d Khan told reporters in the capital, Islamabad.
\u201cIn technical terms, it is called a cascade [failures being caused], one after another. Power plant safety systems began to shut themselves down.\u201d
Khan said a fault \u2013 as yet undiagnosed \u2013 at the 1,400MW thermal power plant caused the country\u2019s entire electricity transmission system, which was handling 10,302MW at the time, to shut itself down.
Repair crews are continuing to diagnose the problem and parts of the system have been restored in the north of the country, he said.
\u201cWe started [the] Tarbela [hydroelectric power plant] twice \u2013 it synced and that allowed electricity to resume to several cities,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Widespread outages Authorities have restored electricity supply to parts of several main Pakistani cities and work on power restoration….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":11742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-c59-islamic-world"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
<\/strong>On Sunday morning, power had been restored to parts of the capital Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Faisalabad, Lahore, Multan, Jhang and Mianwali.
In Karachi, a sprawling metropolis of more than 20 million people and the country\u2019s largest city, outages remained widespread as the city was receiving a fraction of its required power supply.
K-Electric, the electricity supply company in Karachi, said its crews were working on restoring power to all areas, and had successfully resumed supply to the city\u2019s main water pumping stations.
The widespread blackout also caused travel disruptions, with several international airports across the country reporting problems.
As of Sunday morning, however, normal flight schedules appeared to have resumed.
The blackout is one of the worst in the country\u2019s history.
The electricity infrastructure has received a great deal of investment in power generation capacity, but experts have long warned that significant problems remain in the transmission and distribution systems.
In 2015 the country experienced its last sweeping blackout when an attack by ethnic Baloch separatists on a major distribution line in the southwest of the country left more than 80 percent of the country without electricity.
While the increase in generation capacity in recent years has seen large-scale scheduled blackouts, which were once the norm, reduce in frequency, many Pakistani homes and businesses continue to maintain power backup systems, including diesel and gas-powered generators and battery-based uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, particularly in urban areas.
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