Sri Lanka’s nation-wide blackout caused by a ‘mistake’ – CEB

The nationwide blackout in Sri Lanka on Monday was caused due to a mistake by an Electrical Superintendent during maintenance work at the Kerawalapitiya grid sub-station, a top CEB official told Ada Derana.

The entire nation of Sri Lanka was left without power Monday (Aug. 17) in an over seven-hour outage following a failure at the electricity facility.

Additional General Manager (Transmission) of Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) Dr Susantha Perera spoke to Ada Derana ‘Big Focus’ on Friday and revealed the reason behind the island-wide power outage and steps taken to rectify it.

He stated that according to the information uncovered thus far, it is evident that the issue had started during certain maintenance work at the 220KW Kerawalapitiya grid sub-station.

He said that the maintenance work had been mostly completed and that while carrying out the final phase of the said maintenance work, a mistake had been committed by the Electrical Superintendent in charge.

He stated that due to that mistake, which they call ‘earthing’, and as a result of that error in the end the three power plants which were active in Norochcholai had broken down.

The CEB Additional General Manager said the three power plants, which add around 810MW to the system in total, had not broken down at once, but over a certain period.

Dr Perera stated in that process when the power plant breaks down, it has to be restarted once again and that in order to do that they have to wait for the temperature of the boiler to drop down naturally as it does not suddenly drop.

He said they have to wait until the temperature drops naturally in order to once again fill water into the boiler and recommence the entire process. That cooling down period takes around 3-4 days, he said.

He said the temperature cannot be forcibly made to drop as it would harm the equipment.

The CEB Additional General Manager stated that most likely they would be able to add one of the units to the system by this evening and that then hopefully the scheduled daily power cuts would end.