New Delhi: After hours of blackout due to a breakdown of the Northern Grid early yesterday, power supply was restored to almost 80 per cent of areas in Delhi by noon, officials said. Delhi blamed Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh for overdrawing power that caused the grid’s collapse.
“At 2.33am the frequency was very low at Northern Grid and it collapsed. Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh were drawing between 2,500 and 3,000 mega-watts,” Delhi’s Power Minister Haroon Yusuf told reporters here.
A failure in the Northern Grid at 2.32am affected supply to seven northern states, including Delhi. Officials said the failure took place somewhere near Agra, causing the entire system to trip.
Power supply was also hit in Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Jammu and Kashmir.
“Power supply has been restored nearly 80 per cent of Delhi,” an official from Delhi power supplier BSES told IANS.
Yusuf also said by 4am electricity was restored at Delhi airport, the Prime Minister’s House, and All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).
“In the past ten years, this was an unprecedented power failure and we will make sure that such outages do not occur in future,” Yusuf said.
Train services on the 190-km Metro network weaving through the length and breath of the national capital were affected due to the failure of the Northern Grid.
