Thursday, November 12, 2009

Black-Out in Jakarta

Lately, the city of Jakarta has been facing the worst electricity shortage in history.

Every night and day, the city's 10 million people have to take their turns to suffer electricity black-outs at their homes. According to the sole provider of electricity in Indonesia i.e. the state's electricity company PLN this inconvenience was caused by the damage of two of PLN's electric transformer units in Jakarta. And its repair would only be completed by next month, therefore until then the citizens of Jakarta must patiently suffer frequent electricity black out.

For details, please click here and here.

I hope that the damaged transformer units were not caused by PLN's failure to maintain them properly because the government reduced state subsidy for them.

8 comments:

analou said...

I experienced power shortage several times way back when I was living in the Philippines. It is indeed an inconvenience because you can do little things when its dark. Hope it will be fix as soon as possible so that the people there in Jakarta will not suffer.

Thank you so much for the visit and enjoy your day. I find your blog when you left me a message in Blog Catalog.

Unknown said...

Analou,

Thank you for your kind words.
I hope that the problem will be fixed soon so that there will not be more black-out here.

Rob Baiton said...

Harry...

Kind of makes it hard to claim that Jakarta is a functioning metropolis of the modern world, don't you think?

Who is to blame? Inefficiencies at PLN, the government of Jakarta, the central government, the people for demanding / using so much electricity.

It is inconvenient. It is also costly.

Unknown said...

Rob,

You are very right my friend, it's very costly!
We can't blame the citizens because they were the ones who pay PLN.
So ....... (I am shaking my head)

pj said...

Hi Harry.

If its any consolation to you we have been suffering through rotating blackouts here in Bali since I arrived back here in October. Its also very difficult to get power upgrades of get power supplies for new projects such as villas. My neighbor spent a substantial sum on a luxury villa with the plan being to rent it out. Problem is he can't get electrical service and PLN can't guarentee when they will be able to provide such service. Now if you consider that there are multiple villa projects ongoing you can see the dead beaver that the villa business is about to become (in my opinion) unless the government gets this electrical problem sorted out.

btw PLN site has a pretty interesting summary of electrical subsidy versus cost throughout the country

colson said...

I second Analou's opinion; blackouts happen all over the world every now and then.

However the number of breakdowns reported all over Indonesia is pretty high. One of the reasons may be that the ever and fast growing demand isn't matched by the building new power plants.

Unknown said...

Pj,

It is very sad that electricity shortage happens in many parts of Indonesia. because of this fact many investors (foreign & local) canceled investment.

I'll check PLN site you mentioned, thanks.

Unknown said...

Colson,

Yes, the prime reason for shortage is because failure to built new power stations to match the growing demand for electricity.