Sri Lanka on Friday reported a massive nationwide power outage as its entire grid was down, media reports said, making it yet another crisis for the country which has already been going through multiple problems currently. Engineers are working on restoring the grid. 

The grid failed shortly after 11: 30 hours this morning, a senior official of the state-owned Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) confirmed, adding efforts were underway to re-energize the grid. The crisis came a little over a year after when the country witnessed a similar outage in August 2020. 
 
Hardly a week earlier, a key transmission line carrying power to the capital Colombo from the Mahaweli hydro generation complex failed, tripping large parts of the grid, reported Economy Next. 

Significantly, the fresh crisis would further jolt the government as people have already begun rushing to store diesel and other fuels.  All this at the time when the island nation has been struggling to pay and import fuel, whose prices have skyrocketed in recent months. 

Reports suggest that due to heavy rains in recent weeks, the country’s hydropower plants were operating at their full capacity. Small hydro plants, which cannot be dispatched centrally also run at peak levels sometimes making grids unstable.

When a section of the grid fails, the imbalance in frequency can result in the automatic tripping of generators and other parts of the grid in a so-called cascading failure, reported Economic Next. 

Reports suggest officials in the transmission unit had warned the government well in advance about impeding cascading failure. However, ignoring the warnings, the government had sent a senior official of the unit on compulsory leave. 

Engineers say they would probably take many hours before they could restore the entire grid. 

(SAM)