Country’s northern region plunged into darkness on Thursday evening as the HVDC inter-connection substation at Bheramara broke down, reports UNB.
The substation which receives 500 MW of electricity from India tripped in the evening, leading to the blackout.
This also aggravated the load-shedding in the capital city, official sources said.
The whole country experienced over 1,200 MW of load-shedding, including Dhaka alone about 500 MW.
Confirming the breakdown of the HVDC grid substation, Managing Director of Power Grid Company of Bangladesh Masum Al Beruni told UNB that the incident took place around 6:40 pm. “We’re now trying to repair the glitch that affected the power transmission system,” he said.
On November 1, 2014, a similar breakdown led to the collapse of the country’s whole transmission and generation system, plunging the nation into darkness.
PDB officials said they had to go for huge load-shedding across the country due to the power generation shortfall by about 1,200 MW.
They said the country generated about 8,500 MW of power against a demand for over 9,500 MW of electricity.
Harunur Rashid, director (operations) of DPDC, which distributes power to the western and central parts of Dhaka city, said their organisation was allocated about 1,100 MW against a demand of 1,400 MW. “Now, we’ve to go for at least 200 MW load-shedding to cover the shortfall,” he said.
Desco Director Noor Mohammad informed that they were directed to conduct about 180 MW load-shedding to manage the demand of 830 MW.
Desco has been engaged in power distribution to the city’s northwestern and eastern areas.
Meanwhile, residents from many areas of the city said they had to experience power cut for hours on several spells on Thursday.
People in the areas, including Moghbazar, Malibagh, Gulshan, Banani, Tejgaon, Kakrail, Mirpur, Mohammadpur and old part of the city, suffered most.