Yet again, Panipat thermal plant trips
Manish Sirhindi
Tribune News Service

Panipat, January 9
After having tripped the previous night, the three units of the Panipat thermal power plant again developed technical snags late last night, resulting in power disruption.

Units 1, 2, and 4 (110 MW each) of the plant stumbled at 10:07 pm due to tripping of Inter Connecting Transformer (ICT) of the Bhakra Beas Management Board (BBMB) in Sewah (BBMB, Panipat) and simultaneous tripping of all four 220 kV circuits between 400 kV Sewah (BBMB, Panipat) and PTPS, Panipat, sources said.

The trunk lines, including 400 kV Panipat (BBMB)-Dadri (in UP) circuit-1, 220 kV BBMB Sewah (BBMB, Panipat)-Narella Circuit 1 and 3, Panipat-Dhulkot-1 and Panipat-Kurukshetra, also tripped.

The authorities of the state power utilities maintained that this was the third consecutive time in the past three days that a snag at Sewah (BBMB, Panipat) sub-station caused outage of Haryana generating units in Panipat which could even have lead to the collapse of the northern grid.

However, the system collapse situation was averted due to timely action by the Haryana Power Utilites in coordination with the Northern Region Load Dispatch Centre by load regulation and voltage control. The supply to the railway lines was also disrupted for about 15 minutes which was restored by giving supply from 220 kV substation in Safidon.

The three units of the Panipat thermal power plant were revived by 10.34 am today and power supply position in the state stabilised by 11.30 am.

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the power utilities said the BBMB authorities had already ordered investigations to find out the fault in the ICT.

The spokesman for the Haryana Power Utilities said the matter of installation of anti-fog insulators on the system had also been taken up with the BBMB authorities to avoid further tripping of the system. He said the state had already provided 2,400 anti-fog insulators to the BBMB for the purpose.

The power utilities authorities have directed senior officers to personally monitor the transmission and distribution network in order to ensure uninterrupted and good quality power supply to the consumers, the spokesman said.