Experts blame poor electricity transmission equipment, lack of a smart grid, and the ill-equipped National Load Dispatch Centre for Tuesday's national grid failure that caused power blackouts in half the country.
The risk of such failures will persist if the problems are not addressed, they added.
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According to data from the Power Grid Company of Bangladesh (PGCB), 71 incidents of power interruptions were reported due to problems in the transmission lines from fiscal year 2016-17 to 2020-21.
Officials said Tuesday's outage happened when a substation in Ghorashal tripped.
It happened when the demand for electricity suddenly dropped, causing a power surge. This resulted in power stations tripping one after another.
"This would not have happened if there was a smart grid," said prominent energy expert Prof M Tamim.
In a smart grid, the engineers would have instantly noticed the fall in demand and adjusted electricity generation accordingly, he said.
The government had not made enough investment to make use of digital technology in the national grid, he said.
A lot of money has been spent over the last three fiscal years to set up new power transmission lines. But the existing lines should have been modernised.
According to PGCB data, from fiscal year 2017-18 to 2021-22, the 400kV lines that connect the power plants with load centres increased by 114 percent, whereas the 230kV and 132 kV lines that connect the load centres with the distribution points increased by 20 and 17 percent accordingly.
As of June 2022, the PGCB had 1,494 km of 400kV line, 4,018 km of 230kV line and 8,186 km of 132kV line.
But the NLDC's job is mostly done through phone calls among the power stations and distributors. "This is prone to failure. If there was an automated system, the NLDC technicians would have been able to see the real time data on voltage and frequency."
