JEDDAH: Blackouts struck many parts of the Kingdom yesterday for several hours, affecting public life, factories and businesses.
The Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) blamed the incident on the malfunctioning of a transmission line and trouble at some power plants.
The power outage that began at 3:40 p.m. affected people in different parts of Riyadh, Hail, Qassim, and in the Eastern Province cities of Dammam, Jubail and Al-Ahsa, sources said. SEC was able to restore supply by 8:30 p.m.
“The outage was caused by malfunctioning of the 380KV transmission line that links the Eastern Province with Riyadh and problems at three power generating plants in Quraya in the Eastern Province and two plants in Qassim and Hail as well as a number of generating units at Riyadh’s eighth power plant,” said Saleh Mohammed Al-Onaizan, acting CEO of the electricity company.
He said the malfunctioning resulted in the loss of 3,400 megawatts from the network that links the Eastern and Central Regions of the Kingdom, which accounts for 15 percent of the total supply of the network.
He said the company’s experts worked hard to resume power supply in the affected areas. “Within an hour, we were able to restore supply in Riyadh, and gradually resumed operations at the power plants that went out of service,” he said.
Al-Onaizan said SEC has appointed a team to investigate the reasons for the outage so that such incidents could be avoided in future.
However, contradictory to the SEC version, residents in Riyadh said outages in northern and eastern parts of the city lasted for about three hours.
The outage though was limited to some areas of Riyadh. Residents in major residential districts of Olaya, Wizarat, Rowda, Malaz and Aziziya expressed relief that they did not have to endure power outage yesterday.
Khaleel Wasif, a Pakistani technician working for a local power generating company, added there has been occasional blackouts in some districts of Riyadh during the last 15 days due to construction and power repair works.
In Hail, SEC was able to resume supply by linking its network with that of Qassim as its technicians were not able to operate the defunct plants in Hail.
In Buraidah, there were problems at traffic points as a result of power outage, a source said.
Most companies of Saudi Basic Industries Corp. were not able to operate in the Jubail Industrial City as a result of the power cut.
A source at SEC warned of similar outages in different parts of the Kingdom “because of extreme pressure on transmission lines, big demand and shortage in supply.”
— With input from Ghazanfar Ali Khan
