At 11.43 on Saturday morning, a generating unit dropped off the national grid and, within 30 seconds, the whole country was plunged into darkness. Consequently, millions of households, shops and small workshops lost the better part of a working day. Although essential services returned by mid-afternoon, much of the island waited until around seven.
Significantly, the National System Operator (NSO) has since said something worth reading twice. A generating unit tripping, it explained, is a normal safety occurrence at any power station. The collapse of the entire system after such an event, however, is not. In a properly protected grid, the loss of one unit, one line or one substation is simply absorbed and isolated. In Sri Lanka, on the other hand, it brings the nation to a standstill. What is worse, it keeps happening.
Saturday’s failure, in fact, was the fifth total collapse since 2020. Look further back and the list only grows: October 2015, February 2016, March 2016 and, by the CEB engineers’ own account, nine islandwide failures between 2006 and 2010. The triggers may change, yet the outcome does not.
Take August 2020, when an officer at the Kerawalapitiya grid substation operated an isolator incorrectly during maintenance. The inquiry found no robust maintenance protocol and, tellingly, lapses in implementing earlier committees’ recommendations. Then, in December 2021, an earth fault on the Kotmale-Biyagama line was followed by a protection relay that misbehaved. Two years later, lightning struck the same corridor and the failure spread because of protection settings. In February 2025, a monkey at Panadura was blamed, until an expert committee settled on low system inertia caused by an unusually high share of solar power. Even so, the Public Utilities Commission was unconvinced enough to hold its own public hearing, and as recently as August the Electricity Consumers’ Association said it had never been properly investigated.
This time, the Minister has pointed to the Upper Kotmale hydropower plant, one of whose units had tripped the previous day. The Consumers’ Association, meanwhile, doubts a single unit could topple the grid and blames Norochcholai instead. We do not presume to know the answer. Nonetheless, a report has been promised within a month. Needless to say, we have heard such promises before.
Moreover, there is a second pattern. Time and again, the Lakvijaya coal plant at Norochcholai trips in the collapse and takes days to restart. In 2020, for instance, it went down with Yugadanavi, taking around 810 megawatts with it. Once again, all three units are off, two of them for about a week. In other words, the blackout does not end when the lights come back. Instead, it lingers as power cuts and anxiety.
Nor has the institutional picture inspired confidence. The Ceylon Electricity Board was dissolved in March under the new Electricity Act. Yet on Saturday no official spokesman explained what had happened, and Sunday’s Ministry media briefing was cancelled without a new date. Reform was meant to bring clarity and accountability. Sadly, on its first real test, it delivered silence.
Be that as it may, the public is not asking for miracles. It is merely asking for the ordinary competence other countries take for granted. After all, electricity runs the dialysis machine, the water pump, the bakery oven, the garment line and the child’s online lesson. Every lost hour means lost wages for a daily earner and spoiled stock for a small trader.
The debate is often framed as renewable energy versus a stronger grid. In truth, it is a false choice. Rooftop solar has grown remarkably, to nearly two gigawatts by the end of last year, and that is welcome. However, a grid that leans on the sun at midday needs the means to stay steady when something trips: battery storage, inverters that support the system rather than abandon it, modern protection settings, and a control centre that can see and manage small generators. Indeed, the NSO admitted that generators beyond its control complicated the restoration. Clean energy and a strong grid, then, are not rivals. Neither is safe without the other.
What is needed now is not another report gathering dust. Rather, it is a published timetable showing which recommendations from 2016, 2020, 2023 and 2025 have been implemented, which have not, and by when they will be. Above all, Ministers should be judged not by the speed of their explanations but by whether anything changes afterwards.
Sri Lanka has suffered enough blackouts to write a manual on them. Surely, it is high time it wrote one on preventing them.