Lahore: National Transmission & Despatch Company’s (NTDC) nearly 80 percent of power grid stations lack formal event and fault recording mechanisms, resulting in frequent breakdowns amid long spells of announced and unannounced load-shedding in the country.
Official sources told The News that power transmission utilities could not record, locate, promptly repair, and fix responsibility for power breakdowns,” official sources told The News.
An alleged significant willful negligence has been unearthed in NTDC, wherein 16 power grid stations out of 20 were not equipped with any Event and Fault Recorder (EFR) system.
Owing to this, NTDC could not record, locate, promptly repair and fix responsibility for power breakdown.
It is fundamentally a significant breach in delivering a verifiable power transmission network.
One of the primary beneficiaries of such severe deficiency in power grids is independent power producers (IPPs). With no evidence of power failures originating from these power plants, sources said that imposing penalties and remedial measures could not be initiated on their management.
These findings are not mere allegations but based on an official report prepared by a working group formed by NTDC itself.
Without a proper digital monitoring mechanism, fault analysis cannot be done, including fault location and subsequent diagnoses of the whole event.
If NTDC could evolve the ability to record a power failure fault correctly, a systematic process could be launched to fix it.
According to the report titled ‘Commissioning and Time Synchronisation of Faulty/Non-commissioned EFRs at NTDC Grid Stations, North Circle, an eight-member working group was constituted for commissioning and time synchronization faulty/noncommissioned EFRs at various NTDC grid stations.
The working groups observed that only four grid stations were equipped with functional and updated EFRs.
According to the working group’s report, in many grid stations, EFRs are not installed on all bays; therefore, it is strongly recommended that all the bays be equipped with them for complete monitoring of the system.
At the time of energization of the grid stations, the commissioning of EFRs is usually overlooked, and the equipment eventually serves its useful life un-commissioned, hence defeating the purpose of its procurement/installation.
It recommends that EFRs be commissioned prior to the energization of the grid station with dedicated GPS in the future.
It was noted that there are grid stations where event & fault recorders are non-operational after commissioning due to problems in the hardware/software communication/license corruption; besides, there are several grid stations where NTDC management has failed to install updated versions of obsolete EFRs.
The working group recommended that the obsolete EFRs at six identified grid stations be replaced with the latest numerical/digital EFRs with a dedicated GPS Clock in 1+1 configuration having all the communication interfaces, i.e., optical, serial, BNC, ethernet etc.
It is worth mentioning that NTDC has been facing a series of nationwide breakdowns in recent years. No proper analysis of this situation has been done yet, despite multiple recurring transmission grid failures that plunge cities into darkness for hours and sometimes days.
One of the main reasons for these power suspensions is the non-existence of a proper monitoring mechanism. Moreover, NTDC seldom blames such failures on IPPs (Independent Power Producers).