Capital power outage due to interconnection failure, STELCO says
He also said the control systems and grid infrastructure had been reviewed to prevent further issues.
The State Electric Company (STELCO) has confirmed that a disruption in the interconnection via the Sinamalé Bridge between Malé and Hulhumalé caused a capital-wide power outage lasting approximately six hours on Sunday.
STELCO’s Chief Technical Officer, Ahmed Igbal, stated at a press briefing that the electricity supply link between Malé and Hulhumalé was cut off at 12:40 p.m., resulting in a complete power failure. He said the Malé power plant did not have sufficient capacity to supply Hulhumalé at the time of the disconnection.
Efforts were made to bring the system back online as quickly as possible. According to Igbal, limited power generation resumed with engines that were in operation, while one engine had been taken offline for maintenance.
Power was restored across Malé and Hulhumalé more than six hours after the outage began. Igbal said the city’s electricity was being maintained by the remaining engines, but full supply could only resume once the 132kV grid of Hulhumalé Phase 2 was energised.
He also said the control systems and grid infrastructure had been reviewed to prevent further issues and that the cause of the interconnection failure was under investigation.
STELCO’s General Manager of Transmission and Distribution, Ibrahim Nashid, said the company’s SCADA system issued several alarms during the blackout across 123 substations in Malé and 130 in Hulhumalé. He noted that diagnostic work was still ongoing to determine the exact cause of the disruption.
“Our priority was to restore electricity. Once that was achieved, we proceeded with diagnostics,” Nashid said. He added that no significant faults had been identified in the main grid, equipment, or transformers.
STELCO stated that it has sufficient capacity to supply the Malé-Hulhumalé grid and assured that findings from the investigation would be shared once confirmed.
