Fighting monkeys cause nationwide blackout in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has grappled with a struggling energy grid for years, and monkeys are making it worse. On Sunday at around 11:00 local time (12:30 AM EST), a nationwide blackout forced its 22 million residents to either turn to personal generators, or endure the latest outage while temperatures rose to 86 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the Sri Lankan newspaper The Daily Mirror, engineers soon traced the issue to the Panadura Power Station in the town of Colombo. Once on the scene, multiple witnesses including a security guard reported hearing a loud explosion accompanied by a “ball of fire” at the station. A subsequent investigation at the facility quickly confirmed the culprit.

“A monkey has come into contact with our grid transformer, causing an imbalance in the system,” Kumara Jayakody, Sri Lanka’s Energy Minister, told local reporters yesterday.

Although power has since been restored across the country, the hourslong emergency highlighted the energy grid’s ongoing unreliability. In 2022, Sri Lanka experienced multiple widespread blackouts during the nation’s economic crisis, and continues to face regular power shortages. Sri Lanka’s main source of energy production comes from hydropower, but it still often relies on coal and oil, as well. This has proven particularly problematic since the 2022 crisis, when the country used the entirety of its two fossil fuel reserves. Although Sri Lanka now has a supplementary 1,000 megawatt solar energy system, those panels are not directly connected to the island’s primary grid. 

The government continues to explore potential energy grid deals with India, as well as plans to construct a new, larger hydropower plant to boost energy availability. Speaking with The Daily Mirror, however, some local experts said far more is needed to solve the issues.

“These may be the immediate solutions but past governments have failed to act or upgrade the systems,” an unnamed source said. “In fact the national power grid is in such a weakened state that frequent islandwide power outages may be expected if there is a disturbance even in one of our lines.”

Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s monkeys may eventually cause more of these disturbances. The island’s toque macaque population has exploded in recent years, and is currently estimated to range somewhere between 2-3 million monkeys. As humans continue to encroach on their habitats, the macaques are increasingly turning to scavenging food from local crops, damaging agricultural yields and raising the risks of further damage to infrastructure.

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