An informal probe is on into suspected “sabotage” that led to intermittent disruption in the production of two units at North Chennai and Mettur thermal power stations.
This follows Chief Minister Jayalalithaa’s statement in Tirunelveli on Friday that the power crisis was due to some wantonly created technical snags in generation units.
“We are trying to list the instances in which power generation was stopped owing to technical snags. The suspicion is that these snags were a result of mischief by some persons. Even if a problem is rectified within minutes, it takes some time to restore full-fledged power generation,” a senior official said.
The breakdown of the two units was cited as the main reason for the present crisis. The North Chennai unit is expected to resume production on Sunday morning and the Mettur unit a few days later, according to an official of the Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation.
The installed capacity of each of the units is 600 MW. Experts from China were attending to the snag in Mettur as the machine was sourced from that country, the official said.
