Large parts of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka were plunged into darkness on Sunday night after a major power substation in Rampura went out of order, affecting areas covered by the city’s electricity distributors – Dhaka Power Distribution Company Limited and Dhaka Electricity Supply Company Limited.
Initially, the reason for the sub-station going out of order was not clear. The malfunction occurred around 9:45pm.
Power Grid Company of Bangladesh officials said that they were busy restoring power by alternative sources and could not talk about the problem in detail.
‘The Rampura power sub-station is a critical point of power supply and known as a super sub-station,’ said Zulfiquar Tahmid, director of operation, DESCO.
The grid failure resulted in a power shortage of 270MW in DESCO area, he said, representing almost a fourth of its coverage area with a power demand of about 1200MW. DESCO has over 1.2 million customers.
By 11:30pm, he said, power was restored partially, primarily to hospitals and similar other important places.
DESCO officials said that they would have to resort to load shedding the entire night to make up for the power shortage.
In DPDC, on the other hand, power outages affected thousands of customers.
The DPDC supplies electricity to over 1.8 million customers.
The DPDC executive director Shafiqul Islam said that they all were busy restoring the power supply and that they did not have a complete extent of the power outage impact until 11:45pm.
The electricity supply normalised after around 12:20am.
