A blackout that affected 300,000 households in Taipei and New Taipei City on Sunday morning was caused by a transformer exploding, not because of a shortage of electricity, Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs Tseng Wen-sheng (曾文生) said yesterday.
Tseng also dismissed rumors that the power outage came after Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) lowered the voltage of the grid, leading to a transformer at a primary substation in Taipei’s Wanlong District (萬隆) becoming worn and causing secondary substations to break down.
“This is a mechanical malfunction not a power supply issue,” Tseng said. “We had plenty of power. Where is the logic?”
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
The power outage occurred at 9:42am on Sunday after a fire broke out at the Wanlong substation. It affected 305,418 households in Taipei’s Wenshan District (文山) and New Taipei City’s Yonghe (永和), Jhonghe (中和) and Banciao (板橋) districts.
Taipower said the failure occurred after a distribution transformer at the Wanlong substation malfunctioned, resulting in its insulating oil catching fire, which led to an insulation failure and caused the 161 kilovolt and 69 kilovolt power supply systems to shut down.
“It was not a case of operator error, it was equipment failure,” the state-run utility said.
Taipower plans to complete an examination of all of its substations that have the same equipment as the Wanlong substation within 15 days and make improvements before the Lunar New Year holiday, which starts on Jan. 29, Tseng said.
Taipower president Chung Bin-li (鐘炳利) said construction of a new indoor substation in Wanlong District with fire extinguishing equipment was completed two years ago, but due to opposition from residents, the new substation has not been used.
The company plans to compensate the households affected by the power outage.
The bills of industrial users would be cut by the cost of one hour of power consumption if they suffered a power outage of between 10 and 60 minutes, while those of small businesses and household users would be cut by the cost of one day of use if they suffered a power outage that lasted more than one hour.
As power supply was restored for 90 percent of users within 15 minutes and supplies in the districts were fully restored at 1:07pm, 90 percent of affected users are not expected to receive any compensation, while the remaining 10 percent would likely receive only NT$1 in compensation.
Asked to comment on such meager compensation, Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua (王美花) said she has instructed Taipower to re-evaluate the situation before paying compensation.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee yesterday that he had been petitioned by businesses who expressed the hope that the Ministry of Finance would implement tax relief in addition to compensation from Taipower.
In response, Minister of Finance Su Jain-rong (蘇建榮) said as most of the firms that suffered power outages were small businesses, his ministry is mulling the possibility of business tax deductions based on the losses caused by the power outage.
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