Country plunging into darkness

This is a rude reawakening to the longest power breakdown in recent memory the country has writhed under. In fact, it has been the fourth blackout disaster since October 2003 with the Sidr-inflicted one being the longest in 2007. What lessons did we heed in last seven years to avert the catastrophe on Saturday? Precious little.

The authorities, however, can be credited with having brought an end to the crisis within reasonable time. We should also laud people for their mature handling of the blackout with responsibility and resilience. There was no crime during the outage, which is rather unusual in such a situation.

The most important lesson from yesterday's disaster is that the government did not modernize the transmission system as it increased the power generation capacity, thereby creating an imbalance that the system could not handle. In 2007, we produced 3,500 MW whereas today it is 7,400 MW. This twofold increase in generation capacity should have been accompanied by a modern computerized distribution system which should have automatically shut down demands when supply is disrupted.

The fact that more than 100 small, medium and big power generation companies are all supplying to the national grid, made balancing more difficult. So the point is, given the imbalance described above, a disaster was waiting to happen and it did.

While we have grown as an economy and our power consumption has increased twofold in the last few years, so has our vulnerability to power outage. Though we do understand that accidents may occur in the future, let us not be victims of obvious faults as we have been.