PEPCO failures cause massive power outages

LAHORE – Unscheduled load shedding gripped the city on Sunday, as outages of 10 to 14 hours were observed, making life of citizens’ miserable, Pakistan Today has learnt.
Despite closure of offices and industries, there was heavy load shedding irking citizens while the Pakistan Electric Power Company (PEPCO) failed to manage the crisis, as a number of power generation plants went out of order. Instead of acknowledging its failure to cope with load shedding, PEPCO claimed that the situation was temporarily and would soon improve, without telling the exact date of reduction in load shedding.
PEPCO also stopped preparing reports of power generation and demand gap and was hiding details from people. Interestingly, no report on the total power generation and demand in the country was prepared since the last three days.
Electricity in big cities such as Lahore was closed for one hour after every hour while the situation in rural areas was even worse where there was closure of two hours consecutively.
PEPCO was fully aware of the annual closure of canals but did not prepare any alternative plan to deal with the situation, sources said adding that on papers, the company was making tall claims but on the ground, no PEPCO official knew how to deal with the situation on a whole.
“The canals have not been closed yet but even then load shedding has crossed 10 hours in a day,” sources said adding that the situation would not improve in the coming days, as technical repairs were still being carried out on power generation plants and it would take at least one to two weeks for the plants to come into full operation.
According to sources, gas availability would also affect power generation plants, which relied on gas. PEPCO said that it was facing problems due to unavailability of power from oil-run plants.
“If power plants running on oil start generation even then the situation will not improve, as there is a strong chance that generation plants running on gas will be closed, due to gas suspension,” sources said. All city areas remained under load shedding’s grip and electricity was closed early in the morning with repeated intervals until late night.
The water and power ministry spokesman said that the situation was temporary and would soon improve, as thermal generation was partially affected from the Kot Addu Power Company (KAPCO) and AESPAK GEN near Muzzaffargarh due to shortage in delivery of furnace oil by the Pakistan State Oil (PSO).
The spokesman said that power generation from the Jamshoro Power House has been affected due to contaminated water from the Manchar Lake. The cumulative impact on generation from closure of power plants was estimated to be around 1,500MW, which was likely to be soon restored, the spokesman assured.
He said after restoration of power plants, the gap between supply and demand was likely to be reduced to around 1500MW, which was less than in the corresponding period last year. He recalled that shortfall during the same period last year hovered around 4,500 MW. The spokesman regretted the inconvenience caused to consumers and said that load shedding was primarily due to loss of 4,000MW in hydel generation owing to the annual canal closure.