Rare prolonged power outage exposes fragility of grid Business January 17, 2021 LAHORE: The last Saturday’s power breakdown that hit the entire country and couldn’t completely be tackled for long two days has once again exposed the fragility of the grid and the system’s inefficiency. Normally power supply tends to resume in eight to 10 hours after any major power breakdown. However, power failure that struck this time around in night prolonged up to rare 48-hour duration mainly due to imbalance in power supply, thanks to chronic shortfall in primary energy sources. Such helpless scenario exacerbated the situation as coal-fired and nuclear plants meeting base-load faltered for extended periods due to their peculiar power generation processes. Such inability of the power plants rendered whole power grid dead with no backup generation available as considerable time was needed for the startup of both coal and nuclear power units.