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Tenaga Nasional Bhd said its delayed Central Area Reinforcement (CAR) transmission project is exposing Malaysia to risk of a major power failure.

The CAR project, TNB’s fourth high-capacity transmission route has been met with protests by some 20 families

“TNB is now operating under high risk due to insufficient transmission capacity from the existing three high
capacity routes,” said TNB president and chief executive officer Datuk Seri Che Khalib Mohamad Noh at a briefing here yesterday.

About 98 per cent of the project is completed, leaving only the disputed two per cent or 1km of the 60km stretch linking Bukit Tarek in Selangor to the Chubadak substations in Kuala Lumpur.

The unfinished work involved the installation of four towers to complete the fourth route that will channel electricity to some 6.5 million households.

Che Khalib said the January 2005 blackout had cost losses running into billions of ringgit.

The total load loss when power was distrupted for up to five hours then was 6,400MW, affecting three million customers.

The country, Che Khalib said, barely missed another big power disaster on Feb 4 this year when one of TNB’s three existing routes failed.

Fortunately, the incident happened during a non-peak period at 9am.

been inevitable,” said TNB vice-president of distribution Ab’llah Mohd Salleh. Ab’llah said if the CAR project had been completed on schedule, the addition of the fourth high-capacity route would have been able to carry
the excess power in place of the lost circuits.

Che Khalib said the delay had sharply increased the CAR development cost.

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