Dhaka October 4 2022: Nearly half of Bangladesh was left without electricity on Tuesday after a transmission line tripped, discomforting citizens in the humid autumn weather.
The outage, caused by “technical glitches” in the grid, hit four out of eight administrative divisions in Bangladesh, Nasrul Hamid, state minister for power and energy, said by phone. Repair work was underway, he said, without indicating a time for restoration of supply.
By Tuesday evening, the outage had already continued for more than four hours, forcing shopping malls to turn down air conditioners and apartments to switch off back-up generators running on expensive diesel fuel. The power cut is reminiscent of this summer when the South Asian economy witnessed crippling energy shortages as prices of natural gas and coal -- fuels it depends on -- soared amid the war in Ukraine.
One of the transmission lines got overloaded, “creating a cascading effect on other lines,” Yeakub Elahi Chowdhury, executive director of Power Grid Co. of Bangladesh, said by phone. “We instantly went into a protection mode to prevent it from becoming a bigger problem.”
Grid operators are proceeding cautiously to restore power as electricity demand typically peaks in the evening, Chowdhury said, adding full supplies may be restored only by around 8 p.m. local time on Tuesday.
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