UPDATE: The Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) says there will be no power cuts from tonight and the power supply will continue as usual since the supply from Norochcholai power plant to the national grid has been restored.
The Norochcholai (Lakvijaya) Coal Power Plant, which suffered a breakdown on Monday, will add 300 megawatts of electricity to the national from today (21), according to Chairman of the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) Vijitha Herath.
Accordingly there will be no scheduled power cuts in the island from today, he said.
The Norochcholai power plant supplies close to 900 megawatts of electricity to the national grid while a fault at the Kerawalapitiya grid sub-station had resulted in all three power generation units at the Norochcholai plant breaking down on Monday (17).
Due to this, the CEB had announced one-hour scheduled power cuts daily for a period of four days across the island.
Meanwhile a top CEB official told Ada Derana today that the nationwide blackout on Monday was caused due to a mistake by an Electrical Superintendent during maintenance work at the Kerawalapitiya grid sub-station.
Additional General Manager (Transmission) of Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) Dr Susantha Perera speaking to Ada Derana ‘Big Focus’ 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 they would likely be able to add one of the units to the system by this evening and that then the scheduled daily power cuts would end.
