Electricity supply has been restored after the country plunged into blackout following the outage of its national power grid.
Electricity supply across Bangladesh has been restored after the South Asian country plunged into a blackout following the outage of its national power grid, officials said.
The outage, which affected much of the country, began at 2:00 p.m. (0800 GMT) on Tuesday and lasted nearly seven hours before power was fully restored by 21:00 (1500 GMT).
The cause of the problem was not immediately clear.
Grid outages typically occur when there is a strong mismatch between demand and supply, potentially due to unexpected or sudden changes in power usage patterns.
Many large malls in the capital, Dhaka, closed early Tuesday evening. Elsewhere, people gathered at petrol stations to collect diesel to run emergency generators and market vendors operated by candlelight.
Nasrul Hamid, deputy minister of electricity, energy and mineral resources, said in a statement that he regretted the “temporary inconvenience” caused by the power outage.
Officials from the state-run Bangladesh Power Development Board earlier said power transmission had failed in the east of the country.
All power stations tripped and electricity was cut in Dhaka and other major cities, said Shameem Hasan, spokesman for the electricity department.
Bangladesh’s impressive recent economic growth has been threatened by power outages since the government suspended operations of all diesel-powered power stations to cut import costs as prices soared.
The country has rationed some gas supplies amid high world prices driven by Russia’s war in Ukraine. The government promised frugal spending after announcing a record budget deficit last year.
More than a third of the country’s 77 petrol units were running out of fuel, government data showed on Tuesday.
Diesel-powered power plants produced about 6% of Bangladesh’s electricity output, so their shutdowns reduced output by up to 1,500 megawatts.
Earlier this month, Faruque Hassan, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association, said the situation is so bad that garment factories are without power now for about four to 10 hours a day.
“To deal with the (electricity) crisis, we used generators. Today’s outage was unpredictable. We had to close our offices because the generators cannot work for long periods,” Shahidullah Azim, vice president of the association representing more than 4,500 garment factories, told Reuters news agency on Tuesday.
“We cannot run factories without electricity,” Azim added.
Zunaid Ahmed Palak, deputy minister in Bangladesh, said on Facebook that he was “risky to restore (power) with a heavy load”.
Bangladesh is the world’s second largest garment exporter after China, earning more than 80% of its total foreign exchange annually from garment exports.
Last month, the Asian Development Bank said in a report that Bangladesh’s economic growth would slow to 6.6% from its previous forecast of 7.1% for the current fiscal year.
Lower consumer spending due to weak export demand, domestic manufacturing constraints and other factors are behind the slowdown, he said.