The Post looks at the mounting pressure on CLP to improve its services, as six electrical incidents have been reported so far this year.
1. What was the latest outage?
The blackout in Wong Tai Sin on Wednesday last week was the utility’s sixth and Hong Kong’s worst power disruption this year, affecting about 2,250 households and businesses.
Its coverage extended from the Lions Rise private residential complex in Wong Tai Sin to as far as the Mei Tung public housing estate in the neighbouring Kowloon City district.
The Fire Services Department recorded at least five reports of passengers trapped in lifts.
CLP said the blackout began at 8.02pm and lasted until 12.11am the following day, but some residents said electricity only came back in the early hours of last Thursday.
Residents were seen waiting on the streets because their homes had become too warm. A restaurant also said it recorded a loss of at least HK$10,000 (US$1,300) from food spoilage due to the loss of power to water tanks and refrigerators.
2. What were the major disruptions in recent months?
A fire in a substation on Nga Ying Chau Street in Tsing Yi on New Year’s Day led to a voltage dip that saw 20 lift entrapment reported in parts of the New Territories.
In a subsequent investigation report, CLP said the incident was caused by faulty sealing at the end of a cable, which led to a short circuit at the substation.
The second incident, a week later and also in Tsing Yi, involved a faulty cable in On Mei House, Cheung On Estate, which caused a 1½-hour outage that affected 388 residents.
On March 19, a 40kV cable detached from a transmission tower and fell across a flyover in Yuen Long, hitting a minibus and two lamp posts. The incident affected the electricity supply for 68 customers nearby.
About 10 days later, a wildfire in Yuen Long affected surrounding pylons on March 30, causing a set of 40kV overhead power lines to malfunction. At least 53 cases of lift entrapment were recorded.
Next month on April 6, a voltage dip in Tuen Mun resulted in about 160 cases of people being stranded in lifts following an equipment failure at Black Point Power Station.
CLP said about 80 per cent of voltage dip cases were triggered by external factors, such as weather, trees and third-party projects, as around 30 per cent of its power supply facilities were located outdoors.
In a meeting with lawmakers last month, CLP managing director Joseph Law Ka-chun attributed the recent rise in disruptions to the higher frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
The firm said in a statement the latest outage in Wong Tai Sin was sparked by a fault in an 11kV cable.
Environmental authorities said last Thursday that the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department would form a task force with the utility to look into all voltage dips and power supply interruption incidents over the past three years.
3. What have authorities done to hold CLP accountable and prevent similar incidents?
CLP and counterpart HK Electric are the city’s only power suppliers.
The larger of the two, CLP, covers Kowloon, the New Territories and most of the city’s outlying islands.
HK Electric supplies electricity to Hong Kong Island, Ap Lei Chau and Lamma Island.
The Environment and Ecology Bureau last Thursday expressed “deep concern” over the blackout in Wong Tai Sin and demanded CLP “examine its company culture and management system for the entire power supply system”.
Last November, authorities introduced a new incentive-punishment system in response to large-scale power outages.
If CLP records 15 million minutes of power disruptions in a year, it must pay a fine of HK$20 million or be hit with a deduction of 0.015 per cent from its permitted return.
HK Electric will also face a fine of HK$20 million or suffer a 0.03 per cent cut from its return if it has 10 million minutes of outages in a year.
Wednesday’s blackout accounted for about 540,000 minutes, according to the Post’s calculation of affected customers multiplied by the length of the disruption.
The bureau last month proposed hitting CLP with an extra penalty charge for power dips. But the company must agree to the additional charge before it can be implemented.
4. How have politicians reacted?
Lawmakers have said the threshold of the current penalty regime is too high.
Edward Lau Kwok-fan, chairman of the Legislative Council’s environmental affairs panel, urged CLP to compensate affected residents for the latest blackout.
He also called on the government to penalise the power utility according to the degree of responsibility it had for each incident.
Legislator Tik Chi-yuen said the successive incidents over the past six months were unreasonable, unusual and had “seriously affected” residents’ daily lives.
“If such incidents continue, it will dent the residents’ confidence in the power utilities,” he said.
Tik recommended authorities take the lead in looking into “fundamental deficiencies” in the company.
Yeung Nok-hin, a district councillor representing the Wong Tai Sin West constituency, called on CLP to study options to improve reliability and reduce the chance of future emergencies.