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The citywide power failure in Dubai yesterday was due to a sudden failure in one of the main transmission substations at Jebel Ali Power Station, according to the authorities. Dubai Electricity and Water Authority's (Dewa) press statement did not elaborate on the cause of failure, but it contained an apology to its consumers for the inconvenience suffered by them. Officials dismissed agency reports quoting sources that there was a fire in a gas pipeline as pure speculation. "It is normal for people to assume such things under such emergencies," a Dewa official told Gulf News last night. "At this point in time it is a technical fault which led to the power failure. It is not a fire," said the official. The technical fault led to a cascade effect tripping other stations linked to the supply network, he said. It was not a total outage and some areas of Jebel Ali were not affected but had power, he said. "The system is designed to help each other. In very rare cases it leads to a cascade. When the system cannot clear the problem it shuts it down for its own safety and the safety of people," he said. That is, to prevent sudden power fluctuations, power surges which could destroy appliances, cause fires and so on. "Then to get the supply system up and running takes time. It cannot be done all of a sudden. Each generator has to be restarted under close monitoring, one by one," he said. "Nevertheless, we managed to restore the power supply in record time compared with other blackouts in other countries," he said. This is the second citywide power failure in four years. Dewa has a second and third back up system to supply power when there is a failure in the main power supply. But none of them kicked in to maintain the power supply. When asked why, the Dewa official said a high level technical committee has been appointed to study the causes for this sudden failure and to find out why the back up systems also failed to activate.  Arshad Ali/Gulf News Customers shop by candlelight at a store in Al Safa. |  |
Emergency and maintenance teams of Dewa were immediately dispatched to attend to the fault and begin the gradual restoration of power supply, he said. Within two and a half hours power was restored to emergency service sectors such as hospitals and critical business sectors such as the trade centres and dry docks. Most areas of Dubai had its power supply restored by mid-day and by nightfall all areas were back in the loop, said the official. Dewa said it also appreciated the efforts of Dubai Police in keeping the city moving and the cooperation of other government departments. Industry observers outlined the following possible scenario leading to blackouts: All stations feed one network and are therefore interconnected. If there is a failure in one substation the security system will be activated and it will begin isolating the problematic station. Even as it does so, depending on the nature of the failure, there could be a cascade effect which will trip/shut down other stations feeding the network. And since all stations feed the one network it leads to a power blackout. When the entire system shuts down it takes hours to restore power supply because the network has to be built back step-by-step. That is, once the problem station has been isolated, they have to start up the generators one by one, synchronise them and link them to the network. This takes time, said the observers.
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