Glitch in feeder line trips all five units of Thoothukudi power plant

THOOTHUKUDI: All the five units of Thoothukudi Thermal Power Station (TTPS) tripped around 3 am owing to a technical fault on Koodankulam feeder line on Thursday. Officials managed to operate unit 2 to a capacity of 197 MW. TTPS that has five units of 210 MW capacity each generates a total of 1,050 MW.

In order to ensure an uninterrupted power supply during Assembly elections, Tangedo had been operating all five units in the past few days.

According to official sources, they noticed a failure in the Koodankulam feeder line around 2.30 am. "Subsequently, within a few minutes, all the five units tripped in tandem automatically due to load evacuation problems from the generating units. The production of 1050 MW electricity was thus affected until unit 2 was tuned by 1.30 pm," the sources said. Unit 2 generated 197 MW on Thursday.

Another official said that feeder line failure had also led to the shattering of the diaphragm, which releases the excess steam to ensure the safety of the turbines. Except for unit 2, all other diaphragms have been damaged, he said adding that the second unit was loaded immediately. "The efforts to restart the units got delayed as diaphragms could be replaced only when the temperature declines from the supposed 180-degree Celcius," he said adding that the officials lighted up unit 1 around 5 pm and it is yet to begin electricity generation. Efforts are on to operate units 4 and 5.

The blackout of all the five units of State-owned TTPS led to abysmal production of electricity to 2761 MW as against the states total generation capacity of 4,320 MW, said sources.

Efforts to contact the Chief Engineer of TTPS proved futile.