Almost the entire south of Thailand – all 14 provinces – were plunged into total darkness from 7pm, with the electricity not coming back on in some areas until around 11pm.
Rumours abounded that there just wasn’t enough electricity to service every province and so as an energy-saving measure, the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand just turned it off for a few hours.
Other rumours were that it was caused by a car crash into the power station and was going to be turned back on Thursday – such speculation fuelled by scenes witnessed in Koh Samui last December when the entire island suffered an outage that lasted for three days.
During the said hours when the power was down, people feared the worse and rightly so, there were no public announcements made, no emergency SMS messages sent, as occurred during last year’s tsunami scare and certainly no pre-warning.
It was later ‘sort-of’ revealed that the black out was caused by a failure of the main high voltage transmission line connecting the south to the central region.
Why this happened is not yet clear, further investigation is required and will be conducted. Whether that information is made available to the general public is another matter.
This will lead Thailand’s residents to scramble around in the dark searching for answers, leaving us to do what we do best in this country, often caused by having an absence of information – speculate.
The facts are that Thailand simply cannot accommodate all of the new homes, factories, offices and manufacturing plants. It needs more power and by Scotty, that’s what Thailand is hoping for with the recent news that plans for Laos to have a hydropower dam have been given the go-ahead.
When construction is completed in 2019, around 95 per cent of the electricity generated will be sent to Thailand. Laotian and Vietnamese environmental groups are of course up in arms, but that is, again, another matter.
Much of Thailand’s antiquated electrical supply grid is around 40 years old, and it wastes a significant amount amount of energy every second.
So much in fact that if a grid or area loses power there is often not enough in reserve, despite there theoretically being an abundance, to power the affected area.
Now is an opportunity for Thailand to theoretically leapfrog other developing and even developed nations by introducing new technology, namely smart grids.
Such technology works by distributing power effectively and dynamically, based on accurate information gathered about consumers’ demand via digital communications technology.
But whatever Thailand chooses in the future though, the chances are that our days of being kept in the dark are unlikely to end any time soon.