Sri Lanka lost power across the entire island on Friday after the national grid suffered a total system failure, and the Energy Minister says investigators are examining whether a technical fault reported the previous day at the Upper Kotmale power station set it off.

The National System Operator (NSO) — the post-restructuring grid manager that took over the Ceylon Electricity Board’s control function — said the country was experiencing an islandwide outage “following a system failure caused by instability in the electricity grid this morning,” the Daily Mirror reported.

Energy Minister Anura Karunathilaka said the disruption “resulted in an emergency shutdown of electricity supplies as authorities moved to stabilise the system,” and that supply to several areas had already been restored, the Daily Mirror reported at 1.30 p.m. He told NewsFirst that electricity could return to some areas within roughly an hour, with no confirmed timeline for the rest.

The suspected trigger, and what is actually established

Two different claims are circulating and they are not the same claim.

The NSO’s statement describes the mechanism: instability in the grid produced a system failure. That is an account of how the system went down.

The Minister’s statement concerns a possible trigger. Authorities are examining whether the collapse was linked to “a technical glitch reported yesterday at one of the units at the Upper Kotmale Power Station,” and are checking whether that incident “directly triggered the grid disruption or whether other operational factors had contributed to the imbalance.”

The timing detail is the Daily Mirror’s, and it matters: on that account the fault at Upper Kotmale was known on Thursday, a day before the grid fell over. NewsFirst’s filing reports the suspected unit failure without placing it on the previous day, and Hiru News carries the suspicion without a date. Nothing published so far says what the Thursday glitch was, whether the unit was returned to service, or who knew about it.

Both NewsFirst and the Daily Mirror state plainly that the exact cause remains unconfirmed and under investigation. This desk is recording the Upper Kotmale link as a line of inquiry, not a finding.

Rooftop solar owners asked to disconnect

The NSO asked owners of rooftop solar photovoltaic systems to disconnect them until further notice to support restoration, a request Hiru also carried and which the Minister repeated, saying it would help stabilise the grid and speed the work.

This should not be read as a statement that solar caused the outage, and no official has said it did. Bringing a collapsed grid back up requires controllers to match generation and demand step by step; thousands of inverters feeding in unpredictably at midday makes that harder. The request is a restoration measure.

That said, the instrument is a familiar one, and the archive shows how familiar.

Sri Lanka has been warned about exactly this

On 2 October, Ministry of Energy officials told Parliament’s Sectoral Oversight Committee on Infrastructure and Strategic Development that the technical concerns around the solar build-out were grid stability, frequency control and reverse power flow caused by fluctuating solar generation during periods of low daytime demand — the hours when rooftop output peaks and consumption does not. The mitigations described to that committee were about 400,000 smart meters and battery storage placed at distribution-transformer level in Colombo and Kotte. Neither is in place.

Friday’s collapse happened around midday.

The switch-off request has precedent on both sides of the calendar. On Vesak poya day, 30 May, supply was cut to around 100 areas after what the same minister called an “unexpected system imbalance” during a holiday demand slump, and the NSO asked rooftop solar owners to switch off then too. In April, the CEB ordered rooftop systems above 300 kW off the grid for ten days over Avurudu, citing the same midday-surplus problem.

A cascading failure has happened before

Those two episodes were controlled curtailments. There is also a precedent for the thing that actually happened on Friday — a cascading collapse of the grid.

Sri Lanka’s previous cascading power failure was attributed by the Ceylon Electricity Board Engineers’ Union at the time to the grid’s inability to recover from shocks given the large volume of rooftop solar power on the system, EconomyNext reported at 2.14 p.m. The filing does not date that earlier failure, and this desk has no article on it, so its timing is not established here.

Two points follow, and they pull in opposite directions. The union’s view means the solar-stability question has been raised before in connection with a full collapse, not merely with midday curtailment — which is why the disconnect request invites the inference it does. But an engineers’ union attributing a past failure to solar share is not a finding about Friday, and no official has made that link for this event.

EconomyNext also supplies the scale of the shift behind the dispute: renewable generation, counting hydro alongside new private renewables including rooftop solar, topped 64.4% in May 2025, up from 48.3% a year earlier, against a national target of 70% renewable power by 2030. The utility, on this account, is trying to absorb that growth while holding the system stable, and the required investment is not yet made — the same gap the 2 October committee testimony described.

Against that, the Minister has consistently rejected the suggestion that the government is squeezing solar. On 26 September he called claims of curtailment “entirely baseless”, saying 1,513 MW of rooftop and ground-mounted capacity had been added in two years. On 12 September he assured Parliament that no power cuts were expected, citing reservoirs at 58.7% of capacity and 565 MW of battery storage being fast-tracked before March.

The water supply went with it

The outage has already propagated beyond electricity. Water purification stopped at the Ambatale and Biyagama treatment plants, the Chairman of the National Water Supply and Drainage Board said, attributing the halt to the nationwide power failure, Hiru reported at 1.37 p.m.

Ambatale is the principal source of treated water for the Colombo metropolitan area. No filing yet says how long the plants have been down, when purification will resume, or whether supply interruptions are expected.

Update: no plant broke down, says the grid operator

Through the afternoon the NSO moved to shut down a second account of the failure that had been circulating — that several power stations had collapsed.

There were no reports of breakdowns at any power generation plant, the NSO said, and all hydropower plants that were available before the event are operational and are being used to restore the grid, the Daily Mirror reported at 3.46 p.m. NewsFirst and Hiru News carried the same statement.

The single exception is the one this article’s earlier text flagged as unreported: the Norochcholai coal power plant has been shut down in accordance with standard procedures. That wording matters. On the operator’s account Norochcholai going offline was a controlled consequence of the grid failure, carried out to procedure — not a plant failure, and not the cause. A large coal unit cannot ride through a grid-wide collapse, and taking it down in an orderly way is the expected response.

Restoration ran area by area from around noon. More than 50% of supply had been restored by 5.15 p.m., according to the national grid control company, Hiru reported. The NSO put full restoration at around 6.30 p.m. — the first target time given for the event.

Level crossings and water

Two knock-on effects were confirmed during the afternoon.

The Railways Department warned that electrically operated level crossings and their warning systems could malfunction while supply was disrupted, and urged motorists to approach crossings with caution, the Daily Mirror reported at 3.51 p.m. This partially answers a question left open earlier — rail signalling was affected, though no filing says whether train services themselves were suspended.

On water, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board asked consumers to use water sparingly, warning that the electricity disruption could affect distribution and urging households to manage existing stocks until normal operations resumed, the Daily Mirror reported at 2.59 p.m. By 5.46 p.m. the Ambatale treatment plant had resumed operations as power returned, Hiru reported. No filing reports the status of Biyagama.

Update: power fully restored, about five hours past the target

Supply was fully restored late on Saturday night — but the 6.30 p.m. target the NSO had set was missed by roughly five hours on the distribution side.

The sequence through the evening ran as follows. At 7.30 p.m., Energy Minister Anura Karunathilaka said the transmission system had been fully restored and 80% of the distribution system was back, Hiru reported. The NSO confirmed full restoration of transmission at 7.51 p.m., saying supplies nationwide were expected to return to normal shortly, the Daily Mirror reported.

The last stretch took another three hours. At 10.48 p.m. the NSO said distribution through the grid’s substations had been fully restored, NewsFirst reported, and at 11.41 p.m. Hiru carried the NSO confirming that distribution work was complete.

The distinction between the two halves matters. Transmission — the high-voltage backbone — was back within about eight hours. Restoring distribution, the local networks that actually reach consumers, is what took until nearly midnight. A reader whose lights came on at 7 p.m. and a reader whose lights came on at 11 p.m. were both on the same restoration curve.

The outage time, and a five-minute disagreement

Two outlets now give a start time, and they do not quite agree. The Daily Mirror says the islandwide supply collapsed at around 11.45 a.m. NewsFirst, carrying the NSO, says the outage occurred at around 11.40 a.m.

The gap is immaterial to the public but it is the first time any figure has been put on the moment of failure, which this article had recorded as unreported. On either account the event ran from late morning to around 11.41 p.m. — close to twelve hours from collapse to full distribution.

The cause was still unconfirmed at the end of the day

Restoration is not explanation. In the same 10.48 p.m. filing confirming full restoration, the NSO said that the exact cause of the outage has not yet been confirmed.

So the Upper Kotmale line of inquiry described above remains exactly that at the close of Saturday — a line of inquiry. Nothing published during the day established what caused the instability, and the grid operator itself has not adopted the Minister’s suspected trigger.

Water

The Daily Mirror separately confirmed at 6.14 p.m. that water distribution from the Ambatale treatment plant had resumed following the outage, with the National Water Supply and Drainage Board expressing regret for the inconvenience caused to consumers, in its own filing. This corroborates the Hiru report at 5.46 p.m. recorded above. The status of the Biyagama plant is still not reported by any outlet.

How the day unfolded

All times Colombo.

Update, 18 October: a formal investigation, and solar comes back on

The grid operator will open a formal investigation into the collapse, and a preliminary report goes to the Ministry of Energy “within the next few days,” the National System Operator said on Sunday morning, NewsFirst reported at 8.04 a.m.

That answers the last question in the list below — whether any formal inquiry would be opened. It is the operator investigating itself rather than an external body; no statement from the Public Utilities Commission has still been reported, and nothing says whether the regulator will conduct a separate inquiry or who will see the preliminary report besides the ministry.

Rooftop solar systems can be reconnected from Sunday, the NSO said, to help maintain stability in the system. That closes the second open question — when owners asked to disconnect on Friday could switch back on. The disconnection therefore ran roughly a day and a half, from about 1 p.m. Saturday to Sunday morning.

The cause is still not identified. A day after the event, the NSO repeats that the cause of the outage has not been established, and again states that no plant broke down beyond Norochcholai’s shutdown to procedure. The Upper Kotmale line of inquiry is now a day old with nothing added to it.

A ten-hour claim that does not fit the operator’s own timeline

The same filing says power “was fully restored within 10 hours.” That does not reconcile with what the NSO itself said on Saturday night, and the gap is worth setting out, because the figure now entering the record is the shorter one.

NewsFirst puts the collapse at around 11.40 a.m. Ten hours from there is 9.40 p.m. But the NSO’s own statement confirming that distribution through the grid’s substations was fully restored came at 10.48 p.m. — eleven hours and eight minutes after the collapse — and Hiru carried the operator confirming distribution work complete at 11.41 p.m., twelve hours and one minute after it.

The ten-hour figure does fit a different milestone: transmission was confirmed fully restored at 7.51 p.m., eight hours and eleven minutes in, and the Minister had distribution at 80% by 7.30 p.m. So the likeliest reading is that “fully restored” in Sunday’s statement means the transmission backbone and the bulk of distribution, not the completion the operator itself announced near midnight. This desk records the event as running about twelve hours from collapse to full distribution, which is what the Saturday filings support, and notes the operator’s own shorter summary rather than adopting it.

Update, 18 October afternoon: the regulator gets the report, Norochcholai is still down, and a former minister alleges a motive

Three filings on Sunday afternoon materially change the picture, and they do not all point the same way.

The inquiry goes to the regulator after all — on a different clock

The investigation will report to the Public Utilities Commission of Sri Lanka as well as the ministry, and the deadline is a month, the Daily Mirror reported at 12.45 p.m., naming National System Operator (Pvt) Ltd Chairman Pradeep Priyadarshana.

That answers two of the questions left open above. The inquiry is not confined to the operator reporting privately to its ministry — the regulator will see it — and the person directing it is now named.

But the two accounts of the same announcement do not give the same timetable. NewsFirst, filing at 8.04 a.m., had a preliminary report to the Ministry of Energy “within the next few days.” The Daily Mirror, filing four and a half hours later, has the report going to the PUCSL and the relevant ministry within a month. These are reconcilable — a preliminary report in days, a full one in a month — but neither outlet describes two documents, and neither mentions the other’s deadline. This desk records both and adopts neither as the single timetable.

Norochcholai has not come back, and that sits awkwardly with the operator’s account

All three units of the Norochcholai coal power plant remain inactive, the plant’s administration said, and energy specialists warn that electricity generation could be disrupted over the next few days as a result, Hiru News reported at 12.58 p.m.

This is the first filing to report a forward-looking supply risk, and it is the first to say the country’s largest generating station is still offline more than a day after the collapse.

It does not contradict the operator’s position outright, but it strains it. The NSO’s line — repeated through Saturday and again on Sunday morning — is that no plant broke down and that Norochcholai was shut down in accordance with standard procedures. A controlled shutdown and a slow restart are entirely consistent with that. What the operator’s framing does not convey is that the controlled shutdown has left a large block of coal capacity unavailable into a new week, with its own plant administration unable to say when it returns. The operator put that figure at 810 MW on Sunday evening — see the update below, which replaces the roughly 900 MW this article had estimated.

Hiru also repeats the Energy Minister’s Upper Kotmale hypothesis from Saturday and states again that the definite cause has not been established. It adds that the outage cut supply for close to seven hours in many areas — a figure that sits between NewsFirst’s “within 10 hours” and the roughly twelve hours this desk records to full distribution, and which is best read as a typical local duration rather than a system figure.

Ranawaka calls for an independent probe and alleges a solar motive

Former Power and Energy Minister Patali Champika Ranawaka has demanded an independent investigation, saying the government could otherwise conceal the real reasons for the collapse, the Daily Mirror reported at 1.51 p.m.

Ranawaka, an engineer, told Daily Mirror online that the blackout was hard to understand given the sophisticated digitised system control facility installed at Pelawatte. He recalled earlier episodes in which authorities attributed disruptions to a langur monkey damaging a transmission line and, on another occasion, to an overload from rooftop solar.

He then made a specific allegation about motive: that this incident too could be used to discourage rooftop solar generation, to the benefit of two businessmen he accused of dominating the renewable energy sector.

“The Government authorities have done it this time too. They are discouraging rooftop solar panels in this manner to facilitate the duopoly held by two of their crony businessmen in the renewable energy sector.”

This is an allegation by an opposition politician, not a finding, and the Daily Mirror reports it as such. Ranawaka names no one, offers no evidence in the filing, and there is no reported response from the government, the NSO or the Public Utilities Commission.

It is worth setting against what actually happened to solar in this event, which this article records above: owners were asked to disconnect at about 1 p.m. on Saturday and were cleared to reconnect on Sunday morning — a suspension of roughly a day and a half, lifted by the operator itself. That sequence is consistent with a grid-stability measure during a restoration, and it is also the sequence Ranawaka says is being used to build a case against rooftop solar. The filing does not adjudicate between those readings, and neither does this desk.

His demand for an inquiry independent of the grid operator closes a question posed below — whether anyone would call for one — while leaving open whether anyone with authority will order it. The investigation announced so far is still the operator’s own, now with the regulator as a recipient.

Update, 18 October evening: the operator’s own account of the trigger, and an 810 MW hole

A generator came off the national grid at 11.43 a.m. on Saturday, and the system collapsed in under thirty seconds. That is the National System Operator’s own description of how the blackout began, and it is the first mechanical account of the event from the body running the grid.

It also lands with a precise capacity figure. The shutdown of the Norochcholai coal plant has cost the grid 810 MW, the NSO said in a statement carried by NewsFirst at 5.52 p.m. and by Hiru News at 3.38 p.m. This article had estimated roughly 900 MW; the operator’s figure supersedes it. The plant will not be reconnected for several days.

A trigger is not a cause

Hiru’s filing is the more specific of the two verified accounts. It has the NSO saying the internal investigation is to identify the specific chain of events, and their causes, behind the system collapse that followed a generator being suddenly disconnected from the system.

Read carefully, that sentence names a trigger and withholds an explanation. A generator dropping off the grid is the initiating event; what made it drop off, and why the rest of the system could not absorb the loss, is precisely what the inquiry exists to establish. The NSO has not said which generator, what took it off the grid, or why a single unit’s loss propagated into a total islandwide failure.

It is also not the Energy Minister’s hypothesis. The Minister suspected a fault at an Upper Kotmale unit on Saturday afternoon. The operator’s account says only that a generator came off. The two are compatible — Upper Kotmale is a generator — but the operator has still not endorsed the Minister’s specific attribution, a gap this article has tracked since Saturday.

This settles the five-minute disagreement

The Daily Mirror had the collapse at around 11.45 a.m.; NewsFirst, citing the NSO, had it at around 11.40 a.m. The operator’s own retrospective puts it at 11.43 a.m. — between the two, and from the body best placed to know. The gap was always immaterial; it is now closed.

A restoration timeline that does not match the one the operator gave on the night

The fuller sequence comes from ITN, the state broadcaster, filing at 8.04 p.m. ITN is not among the newsrooms this desk counts as verified, and it is cited here only for detail that no verified outlet carried; it is not an aggregator, and the material below is attributed to the NSO throughout.

On ITN’s account: restoration began quickly, with main hydro generators being added back by 12.11 p.m. and the system re-energised in four sections. Reconnection was complicated by small generation sources outside the control centre’s control. Distribution feeders were progressively energised from 12.37 p.m., and by about 3 p.m. supply had been restored to essential services including major hospitals, water purification plants and the airport. By 5 p.m., ITN says, all grid substations had been connected and the vast majority of consumers were back.

That last milestone does not sit easily with what the NSO and the Energy Minister said as the evening actually unfolded. On Saturday night the Minister put transmission at 100% and distribution at 80% at 7.30 p.m.; the NSO confirmed full transmission restoration at 7.51 p.m., distribution through grid substations at 10.48 p.m., and completion at 11.41 p.m. A retrospective account placing all grid substations back at 5 p.m. compresses that by several hours.

The two can be partly reconciled — “the vast majority of consumers” is not “full restoration”, and the last stretch of distribution is where the night’s delay sat. But the grid-substation milestone is stated at 5 p.m. in one account and at 10.48 p.m. in the other. This desk records both and adopts neither, consistent with how it has handled the competing inquiry deadlines above.

Why the 810 MW gap is survivable, and who disagrees

Hiru carries a reassurance the NewsFirst filing omits entirely. The NSO says that because rainfall has lifted hydro generation and demand is relatively low, supply can be managed over the coming days with minimal impact on consumers.

Set that against the filing from earlier the same day, recorded above: Norochcholai’s own plant administration said all three units remain inactive and that generation could be disrupted over the next few days. The grid operator and the plant’s management offered opposite levels of reassurance about the same 810 MW, hours apart, and neither filing acknowledges the other.

A union says the outage is being misrepresented

ITN also reports that the Lanka Electricity Workers’ Union says some people are spreading false propaganda about Saturday’s collapse. The filing does not say what the claims are, who is making them, or what the union says the truth is.

It is recorded here because of what preceded it: former minister Patali Champika Ranawaka alleged earlier the same day that the blackout would be used to discourage rooftop solar for the benefit of two businessmen. No filing links the union’s statement to Ranawaka’s allegation, and this desk does not assert that it answers him.

Not reported

The day’s statements closed several gaps — the status of the generating fleet, Norochcholai’s shutdown, the effect on level crossings and water, the time of the collapse, and the fact and timing of full restoration. What is still missing is the harder material.

No filing gives the number of consumers affected or a figure for lost load. None explains why the 6.30 p.m. target was missed, or what the remaining 20% of the distribution system was that took from 7.30 p.m. until nearly midnight to bring back.

Crucially, nothing published so far explains what caused the instability — a point the NSO itself confirmed was still open at 10.48 p.m. The Upper Kotmale glitch remains a line of inquiry and nothing says what the Thursday fault was, whether the unit was returned to service, or who knew about it. The NSO’s confirmation that no plant broke down narrows the field without identifying the trigger. No official has addressed whether the grid’s renewable share bears on Friday’s failure, and the earlier cascading failure the CEB Engineers’ Union commented on is undated in the filing that mentions it.

Nothing reports the status of hospitals, Bandaranaike International Airport, the ports or telecommunications, or whether train services were suspended. No official has said whether the system’s black-start capability was adequate to the event.

On the investigation, Sunday afternoon supplied a name — NSO Chairman Pradeep Priyadarshana — and a second recipient, the Public Utilities Commission. What is still missing is whether the findings will be published, which of the two reported deadlines governs (days or a month), and whether the two filings describe one document or two. The PUCSL itself has still said nothing, and no authority has ordered the independent inquiry Ranawaka is demanding; the process announced remains the grid operator examining its own failure.

On Norochcholai, no filing says when any of the three units will return to service, what is preventing the restart, how much capacity is unavailable, or whether the CEB has scheduled load shedding against the risk its plant administration has flagged. No government or ministry response to that warning has been reported.

On Ranawaka’s allegation, there is no response from the government, the NSO, the Public Utilities Commission or the two unnamed businessmen, and no filing tests the claim.

Update, 19 October: an energy expert says power cuts may be needed, and puts the loss back at 900 MW

Sri Lanka may have to impose at least limited power cuts with all three Norochcholai units down, and restoring the first is expected to take four to five days, energy expert Dr. Vidura Ralapanawa has warned, the Daily Mirror reported at 10.56 a.m. on Monday.

This is the first published estimate of when any unit returns, and the first time anyone has said out loud that load shedding may be required. Both were listed as unreported in the section above.

The capacity figure has gone backwards

Dr. Ralapanawa says the breakdown removed “around 900 megawatts” from the national grid.

This article had estimated roughly 900 MW, then replaced that with the NSO’s own figure of 810 MW when the operator published it on Sunday evening. An independent expert is now back at 900 MW, one day later, with no reference to the operator’s number.

The gap is 90 MW — about 11% — and neither figure is sourced to a plant-by-plant breakdown in any filing. The 810 MW figure remains the one attributable to the grid operator and is the better-sourced of the two; Dr. Ralapanawa’s 900 MW is recorded as an expert’s estimate, not as a correction to it. No filing acknowledges that the two numbers differ.

His case for cuts is about Monday, not Sunday

The warning is time-specific. “Today is Sunday, so electricity demand is relatively low. There will be no major issue during the daytime, particularly with solar power contributing to the grid. However, the situation could become challenging from tomorrow when demand increases,” he said — remarks made on Sunday and published on Monday morning, which is to say the day he was warning about.

He said authorities would have to consider how to manage supply during peak demand, “particularly between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m.,” amid uncertainty over whether available generation would be sufficient.

On the fallback, he is explicit that it is expensive rather than impossible: “Even if we use oil and diesel-fired power plants around the clock, the question is whether we can meet the huge demand. This would also incur a substantial cost, which ultimately has to be borne by the public.”

That last clause is the part with consequences beyond this week. A multi-day coal outage covered by oil and diesel is a tariff question, and he is the first person quoted in this story to say so.

He blames the system, not the fault

Dr. Ralapanawa’s sharpest criticism is of the pattern rather than the incident. “This is not the first time this has happened. Several institutions have studied the reasons behind these breakdowns and made recommendations on what needs to be done to prevent them. However, those recommendations have not been adequately implemented, and responsibility has been neglected,” he said.

He argued authorities must address longstanding weaknesses rather than stopping at the immediate cause: “What needs to be done is not to find out where the monkey jumped, but to find out how to maintain this system stably, no matter what monkey jumps.”

That is a direct challenge to the framing this article has tracked since Friday, in which the investigation has been almost entirely about locating a single triggering fault — first at Upper Kotmale, then unidentified for three days running.

Where this leaves the operator’s account

The NSO’s position has been that no plant broke down and that Norochcholai was shut down to procedure. The Daily Mirror’s headline — “Power cuts possible as Norochcholai breaks down” — and Dr. Ralapanawa’s language both describe a breakdown.

That is now three incompatible characterisations of the same plant status: the grid operator’s controlled shutdown, the plant administration’s own statement that all three units remain inactive with generation at risk for days, and an independent expert describing a breakdown severe enough to need four to five days per unit and possible rationing. No filing reconciles them, and no government or CEB response to the load-shedding warning has been reported.

Still not reported

No filing says what is actually wrong at Norochcholai, whether the three units failed for the same reason, or why restoration takes four to five days. None says which oil and diesel plants are being run, at what cost, or who bears it.

Update, 19 October evening: the load-shedding question is answered

The question this article had left open all weekend — whether the CEB would schedule load shedding against the loss of Norochcholai — was settled on Monday evening. The Public Utilities Commission approved one-hour evening power cuts for three days, 19 to 21 October, with the island divided into four groups cut in turn between 4.30 p.m. and 9.00 p.m.

The schedules released by the CEB attribute the measure to “insufficient generation resulting from unavailability of Lakvijaya Power Station caused by a blackout” — the regulator’s document tracing the plant’s unavailability back to Friday’s grid collapse. The request was made by the NSO to the commission and the Energy Ministry earlier the same evening, Hiru reported from a briefing at the Government Information Department, and the Daily Mirror carried it at 5.14 p.m. Approval followed within about half an hour, per Hiru.

Dr. Ralapanawa’s warning, recorded above as an outside expert’s view rather than an announced schedule, was borne out the same day it was published.

Full schedule and group allocations: PUCSL clears one-hour evening power cuts for three days as Lakvijaya stays offline.

Still unanswered: when any of the three units returns, and whether cuts continue past Wednesday.

This is a developing story and will be updated.