Four out of the seven units of the Ashuganj Power Plant caught fire yesterday because of a fault in the grid auxiliary transformer, plunging a number of areas under the plant into several hours of darkness.
It took two hours of frantic effort for firefighters to tame the blaze that had reportedly caused losses worth hundreds of thousands of taka.
The fire incident comes in just over two weeks after the countrywide blackout, whose reasons, the government say, are still not clear.
“Around 3am yesterday, four out of the seven units were shut down after the lightning arrester of the 132/33 KV grid auxiliary transformer at the power station caught fire. It took our engineers 12 hours to repair the transformer and restore power generation,” Md Nurul Alam, managing director of the Ashuganj Power Station Company Limited (APSCL), told the Dhaka Tribune yesterday.
The lightning arrester is a protective device for electrical equipment that reduces excessive voltage resulting from lightning to a safe level by grounding the discharge.
Nurul said the fire had spread quickly because of the oil spill from the exploding transformer.
“Now there is no problem with the power supply from the station because the faults had been fixed. The four affected units started regular generation around 3pm,” he said.
“The units are capable of producing 260MW of electricity. Unit 2 with 50MW capacity, GT 2 with 40MW, Unit 3 with 130MW and the 40MW gas engine unit were shut down immediately,” he added.
He informed that a fault finding committee, headed by AMM Sazzadur Rahman, executive director of APSCL, had been formed.
“Repairing work of two other units at the power station have been going on for two years. We have already repaired 80% of those units,” he said.
The station at Ashuganj is the second biggest power station in Bangladesh. The current generation capacity of its seven units is 671MW.
