The last two generating units at the Norochcholai Lakvijaya coal power plant were due back on the national grid on Friday, completing the plant’s recovery from the island-wide blackout of 17 October.
The National System Operator (NSO) said Unit 03 was scheduled to be reconnected on Friday morning, with Unit 01 to follow by the afternoon, NewsFirst reported.
With all units back, the total capacity the plant contributes to the national grid is 810 megawatts.
How the outage unfolded
A nationwide power failure struck at 11:43 a.m. on Saturday 17 October, caused by an imbalance in the transmission system. All three generating units at Lakvijaya tripped as a result.
With the country’s largest plant off the system, the NSO divided the island into four zones for rotational demand management — the schedules that governed power cuts over the following days.
The operator said on Thursday that daily demand management was no longer required, after the plant’s second unit returned to its full 270MW output. Friday’s reconnections restore the remaining headroom rather than ending the cuts, which had already been lifted.
Context
Norochcholai is the single largest generating asset on the Sri Lankan system, and the sequence of this month’s outage illustrates why: the loss of one plant was enough to require island-wide rationing for close to a week.
At the time of writing, NewsFirst was the only verified newsroom this desk found carrying the reconnection timetable for Units 03 and 01; neither the Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing nor Hiru’s homepage had filed on it.
