Failed power

The power crisis in the country is getting embarrassing – or should be – for the government. Less than a week after a huge breakdown hit the entire country last Friday, another one occurred which plunged many parts of Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Azad Kashmir into pitch darkness. The fact that complaint lines were not available to answer questions asked by subscribers who were generally left without either gas or electricity did not help matters as the breakdown continued from 3:15pm onwards till, in some cases, late into the night. The reasons for the crisis have been attributed to the tripping of a 500KV transmission line at Guddu, triggering tripping all down the distribution system as power plants at Tarbela Dam, Mangla Dam, Ghazi Barotha Power Project and IPPs across Punjab closed down, leading to zero power generation for some periods. The government claimed that the reason was dense fog. Fog apparently caused the distribution network to trip. We are also told that a 400MV transformer caught fire at Guddu, causing the initial tripping. The lack of proper mechanism to extinguish the fire, with a fire brigade finally called in from Jacobabad which reached the site after one and a half hours did not help matters. While southern Sindh and Balochistan were not affected by the power outages, the tripping of the power grid in winter raises serious questions about what is being done to fix the problems plaguing Pakistan’s distribution and generation network. An inquiry has been ordered into the matter by the Minister for Water and Power Khawaja Asif.

The federal government seems to believe that the way out of this crisis is to build new power generation plants. But the simple fact is that the country does not have the capacity in its distribution network to be able to deal with anything close to peak demand. Given that the government has been in place for three years and has promised to solve the power crisis by 2018, the fog excuse is rather lame. It has also been reported that despite Nepra warnings in January last year regarding trippings the National Transmission and Dispatch Company did nothing. Technical faults continue to plague both the production and distribution sides of the country’s power grid. The Ministry of Water and Power has claimed that the generation units tripped due to higher loads compared to capacity. Last year, the situation in the winter was similar as the national grid tripped a number of times during the cold and foggy weather. This time a late winter is probably why December went without a major power failure. Pakistan’s power infrastructure is rotten and needs major investment. The government is still relying on the dangerous promise of privatisation to solve the issue, instead of putting in money to upgrade the eroding system. If the weather remains the same, such incidents are likely to return in the very near future. And we shudder to think of what comes our way this summer. Moreover, what will happen to this depleted transmission system when over 8000 MW to 10,000 MW of power is added in about three years under the CPEC projects?