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UnusedCandidate t1_j5jfyjg wrote

Reply to comment by pargofan in Nearly 220 million people in Pakistan without power after countrywide outage | CNN Business by calbert1735

Voltage fluctuations from what I read. Also, the energy sector in Pakistan is deep in debt. This has prevented upgrades to the system. So maybe that. Old systems

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pargofan t1_j5jj1jx wrote

95% of the country at once? Wow.

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UnusedCandidate t1_j5l1pid wrote

Did some digging. As per some forum posts, apparently power stations are turned off at night to conserve fuel and reduce loads. When the restart was attempted on Monday morning, the grid failed.

Another theory is that the load was too high on a local grid(Quetta, Balochistan), causing it to trip and sort of domino effect the entire national grid from there.

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Can't confirm either one in any meaningful way though.

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pargofan t1_j5l2dty wrote

Thanks for looking into it. Sounds temporary but amazing how it affected so many at once.

As an American, it's unreal to think of 220 million people suddenly losing electricity all at once.

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UnusedCandidate t1_j5l3dud wrote

Seems fairly common. There's a tight Forex squeeze, Pakistan has no fuel resources of its own. It all culminates to this. There's also a third theory that a Chinese made grid control system failed, leading to this.

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FormidableFloof t1_j5m0da4 wrote

Why would they do that? It's not like I don't know they are sabotaging the world on many levels, but still, what would be the motive?

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Amorougen t1_j5mnq96 wrote

How many people in the US lost power in 2003? Answer: 50 million. Can't remember duration, but some sites claim more than a day. Seems to me it was more than that in the Detroit area. I know the auto industry shut down, and cellular towers went dark. Good old POTS telephones worked though - powered off batteries (big batteries and lots of them). No comparison to what is happening to Pakistan however.

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50-Minute-Wait t1_j5karni wrote

China is also threatening to fuck with the power over non-payment to its plants.

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