NEWS & UPDATES
SARAWAK ENERGY ASSURES PUBLIC AND BUSINESS THAT POWER SUPPLY AND STABILITY HAS BEEN FULLY RESTORED
SARAWAK ENERGY ASSURES PUBLIC AND BUSINESS THAT POWER SUPPLY AND STABILITY HAS BEEN FULLY RESTORED
CEO apologizes for unexpected incident and promises thorough investigation to ensure incident does not recur
Kuching, Friday 28 June 2013– Sarawak Energy today assured the public and business community that power supply and stability has been fully restored throughout the state, following the significant disruption that occurred yesterday evening.
The outage occurred at 17.36pm on 27thJune, when an unexpected and serious frequency drop, originating from the Bakun Hydroelectric Plant, led to the shutdown of all our power stations – Sejingkat in Kuching, Batang Ai, Mukah Coal Plant, as well as Bintulu and Miri gas plants.
Just before this incident, the system had a total load demand and supply of 1555MW. In this incident, Bakun, which at the time had a load of 884MW, dropped its load (supply) by 456MW in 10 seconds, causing a serious frequency drop to below 47.5hz in the system (normal operating frequency in Sarawak is at 50hz). To protect the integrity of all the other generators in the system, the safety tripping was automatically activated, resulting in the shutdown of all other power stations in the grid. This is termed as a “No Recovery situation”.
Within 10 minutes, we initiated the Blackout Restoration Plan to start-up all the generation plants with the following results - Batang Ai HEP (restarted at 5.53pm), Tun Abdul Rahman Power Station (restarted at 5.56pm), Bintulu Power Station (restarted at 6.21pm) and Miri (restarted at 7.45pm). Bakun was only able to be synchronized to the grid after 10pm. Two power islands were created on North and South Sarawak while Bakun was delayed, leading to a serious delay in restoring power supply to Sibu. The state grid was re-established by 11.30pm and all loads were fully restored by 2.07am on 28thJune 2013.
CEO of Sarawak Energy, Torstein Dale Sjotveit said, “I want to personally apologise to the local and business community in Sarawak for the inconvenience and discomfort that they have faced over this incident. I assure you that the system is stable now and we will take all possible measures to ensure that such an incident does not recur. We have commenced an internal investigation and will seek support from third parties to understand the cause and gaps that may exist in the system and maximize the learning from this incident to avoid such incident to recur.”
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