TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - House of Representatives (DPR) Deputy Speaker Fahri Hamzah urged state-owned electricity company PLN to take responsibility for the massive Java power outage. The outage effectively affected West Java, Jakarta, and Banten on Sunday, August 4, 2019.

"PLN must provide an explanation over what actually happened in the recent days. This includes answering questions about compensating their customers," said Fahri on Monday, August 5, 2019.

Fahri added that PLN must elaborate to the public about the firm's contingency plan to anticipate similar incidents in the future and to avoid the power outages from being a massive nation-wide event.

"It can be explained after that, about a more autonomous electricity distribution system. Because it is extremely dangerous if blackouts happen in a massive scale caused by a non-autonomous system," says Fahri.

Previously, PLN mentioned that the blackout initially happened because of several disturbances in its Ungaran-Pemalang 500 kV extra-high-voltage power-line tower (SUTET).

PLN's strategic procurement director Djoko Raharjo Abumanan says that the Java power outage affected at least 21.3 million customers in the past two days. He says all of which will be compensated and is currently calculated by PLN.

DEWI NURITA | HENDARTYO HANGGI