Mumbai plunges into darkness after Tata Power unit trips

A sudden tripping of 500 MW unit of Tata Power early this morning led to power outages in several parts of south and central Mumbai. Blackout affected the functioning at various establishments including banks, trade and commercial offices, hotels in the city. Most of them shifted to generators and inverters but this provided temporary relief.
The affected consumers are mostly of the state-run BEST power in the island city. The BEST (Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport), which gets its power supply from Tata Power, has around one million consumers in the city.
This tripping resulted in load reduction for few hours in Parel, Mahalaxmi, Dharavi, Chembur and Grant Road areas of south Mumbai. This impacted controlling loading on the 220Kv Kharghar-Nerul-Sonkar-Trombay tie line which supplies power to the city. Tata Power last month has received distribution licence up to August 2039.
Tata Power in a release said '' Today, at 09:45 hours, the Mumbai power supply was affected due to tripping of Unit 5 of 500 MW capacity at Trombay Power Station due to technical hurdle. Unit 5 restoration work is under progess. Partial load has been restored through the hydro stations and the Company has activated the initialisation activities of its cold standby Unit 6 which runs on oil and was kept on cold with the consent of the procurers. While the power is available in neighbouring areas of Maharashtra however due to overloading of state transmission network, it has not been made possible to import power for Mumbai by these distribution companies. The distribution companies are now doing a rotational load shedding in their respective areas of about 200-300 MW. Units are expected to be fully restored and power is expected to be normalized fully by late night today.''
Further, BEST, in a statement said following the tripping at Tata Power unit, it has been facing transmission constraints to bring power from outside to the city. "Due to this, rotational load shedding has been imposed by Tata Power in Dadar, Mahim, Dharavi, Sion, Prabhadevi, Parel, Sewree, Byculla, Chinchpokli, Girgaon, Mumbai Central and part of Hutatma Chowk, Ballard Pier, Nariman Point and area around Metro Cinema," BEST said.
Meanwhile, Reliance Infrastructure R Infra), which supplies power in the western suburbs of the city, said, ''Tata Power Unit-5 of 500 MW generation tripped and due to constraints on the transmission system, replacement power could not be brought into Mumbai. In view of this there was short availability of power in Mumbai resulting into load shedding of consumers of TPC, BEST & RInfra. This was done in accordance the directions from state load dispatch centre (SLDC)."