In the early afternoon today, there was a voltage dip recorded at approximately 1418hrs (2:18 PM). A snapshot of this dip waveform captured in one of our sites in Bedok area is shown below. We also received several calls from various sites scattered over the island, reporting chiller operations being affected, etc. These could only mean one thing; a transmission level (eg. 230kV) fault had occurred.
Coincidentally, a report from ChannelnewsAsia reported an incident at SGX at approximately the same time, as shown in the following news snapshot. Without knowing further detailed information, I cannot really confirm / comment if these two incidents are related.
Voltage dip, while it typically occurs for just a slight fraction of a second may result in serious consequences when critical sensitive equipment are not being adequately protected. Usually, semiconductor plants suffer the most in these type of incidents, as their process equipment etc are very sensitive to variations in the power supply.
Voltage dip mitigation comes in various forms; some are battery-based like the the UPS (which is also a mitigation against a total blackout), while others are batteryless like the SoftSwitching MiniDysc (which caters for variation in the power supply for a few seconds only). The latter is preferred for dip mitigation as batteries require a rigorous maintenance and replacement programme, to ensure the batteries do work when they are called for.
