Residents of Tsing Yi’s On Mei House, Cheung On Estate, are stranded in the foyer of the estate amid a power outage on Sunday morning. The outage affected 388 customers before power was restored after 86 minutes. (PHOTO / FACEBOOK ACCOUNT OF LO YUEN-TING, DISTRICT COUNCIL MEMBER OF KWAI CHUNG EAST)

Experts and representatives from various sectors in Hong Kong urged the city's major power company, CLP, on Monday to carry out thorough inspections of its electricity supply system following two power outages within the same week, affecting communities in Tsing Yi.

A power outage occurred at 9:38 am on Sunday due to a faulty power cable, affecting 388 customers at Tsing Yi’s On Mei House, Cheung On Estate. The incident was fixed in 86 minutes.

Another incident occurred on New Year’s Day, when there were voltage dips in Kwai Tsing, Ma On Shan, and Sha Tin in the New Territories after a mechanical failure at an electrical substation on the district’s Nga Ying Chau Street.

Electrical power to Tsing Yi is supplied by CLP, a major electricity company in the city. The Electrical and Mechanical Services Department had a meeting with CLP on Monday to follow up on details from the investigations into the two incidents. The government has instructed CLP to submit detailed reports on the two incidents within two weeks and four weeks respectively.

CLP said the two incidents were unrelated.

Cheung Wing-ho, chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Electrical and Mechanical Industries Trade Unions, told China Daily that he believes there was no connection between the two incidents despite their proximity to each other and their similar timing.

Cheung said that the electrical devices involved in both cases had not reached the end of their service lives. He said he believes the incidents were likely caused by a lack of timely repairs or inadequate maintenance, possibly due to insufficient manpower.

He suggested that comprehensive inspections and maintenance of the electrical devices should be conducted on a regular basis, noting that the entire industry should step up efforts to train more personnel.

Experts and representatives from various sectors in Hong Kong urged the city's major power company, CLP, on Monday to carry out thorough inspections of its electricity supply system following two power outages within the same week, affecting communities in Tsing Yi

Residents were reportedly trapped in elevators during both incidents. Cheung advised property owners to prepare a backup power supply if conditions permit.

Hong Kong lawmaker Michael Tien Puk-sun expressed his concern about the government's penalty mechanism, pointing out that the current mechanism focuses only on major incidents while smaller-scale incidents are likely to go ignored.

Tien said he is worried that power companies will not have to be responsible for small-scale power outages in the future.

According to the government’s current penalty mechanism, power providers are subject to a cut in permitted profits if power outages as a whole exceed a certain duration. The duration is measured according to a formula, which multiplies the number of customers affected by the blackout time, in accordance with the Customer Interruption Duration (CID) indicator introduced last year.

In the case of Sunday’s power outage, the CID was 33,000 minutes, which is far lower than the 15-million-minute threshold required to trigger the penalty mechanism for CLP. The mechanism imposes a fine of HK$20 million ($2.56 million) if the CID hits the threshold for CLP, which is doubled if the CID exceeds 30 million minutes.

For Hong Kong Electric, another local power supplier, the threshold for triggering a fine is 5 million minutes in CID.

Contact the writer at amberwu@chinadailyhk.com