15-hour power outage in North India as transmission collapses

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North India on Monday suffered its worst ever power failure in 10 years, triggered by a grid failure, paralysing normal life in eight states, including the national capital, for over 15 hours.

Electricity supply was completely restored by evening.

The northern transmission grid collapsed at 2.35 AM, plunging Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, J&K, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chandigarh into darkness.

Railways and Delhi Metro came to halt for a few hours in the morning, as power supply to them was disrupted. While 300 trains were delayed, Metro commuters in the National Capital had a harrowing time.

Water supplies in major cities were also hit.

Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said a three-member committee has been formed to inquire into grid failure. "The panel will submit its report in the next 15 days," he said.

He said, "The fault is not known as yet... somewhere near Agra, a failure has happened. We will inquire..."

Meanwhile, Delhi Power Minister Harun Yusuf blamed UP, Haryana and Punjab for over drawing power from the grid and causing it to trip.

"The grid collapsed due to overdrawal of power by Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab," Yusuf said.

The supply was restored in phases. The grid was made completely functional after 15 hours.

"We have completely restored the Northern Grid. Right now, there is about 28,000 to 30,000 MW available in the grid," PowerGrid Corp CMD R.N. Nayak said in the evening.

"In 2001 and 2002, grid failure had happened. After 10 years it has happened now... the grid at that time (2001-02) failed during midnight and was only restored at 4.30 PM," Shinde said.
More than one-fourth of the country's population was impacted by the grid failure.

Country's largest power producer NTPC's six plants, having a total capacity of over 8,000 MW, were hit by the collapse.

In the evening, an NTPC official said all the affected plants have resumed operations and are now connected to the grid.

NTPC's six plants - Singrauli (2,000 MW), Rihand (2,500 MW), Dadri (1,820 MW), Auriya (652 MW), Anta (413 MW) and Badarpur (705 MW) - stopped generating following the failure. Many of them were being partially restored, the official said.

India has five electricity grids - Northern, Eastern, North Eastern, Southern and Western. All of them are inter-connected, except the Southern grid.

All the grids are being run by the state-owned Power Grid Corporation, which operates more than 95,000 circuit km of transmission lines.

One circuit km refers to one kilometre of electrical transmission line.