All cities continue to face power load shedding for 10-16 hours while PEPCO keeps up with its old habit of hiding the facts about the shortfall, quoting wrong figures to reporters on Monday.
Sources told Pakistan Today that PEPCO was facing a shortfall of more than 6,000MW these days but its media section said the current shortfall was only 3,800MW.
Almost every large city of the country is facing at least 10 to 12 hours of load shedding while in rural areas this closure crosses 16 hours a day. Electricity supply even in Lahore is shut for one hour after every hour and it has become impossible for the people to perform their routine works.
Despite the fact that outages crossed 12 hours a day, everything in PEPCO’s books still remained good.
The generation remains 10,214MW while demand is 14,014MW. According to PEPCO, hydel generation is 2,569MW, thermal is 1,862MW and IPPs are producing 5,783MW.
However, sources in the Ministry of Power said the figures were forged and did not reflect the actual demand and supply gap.
If we consider these figures, load shedding should not exceed six to eight hours but in reality it has crossed 12-16 hours, said a senior ministry official, adding that generation is not more than 8,000MW these days while demand is touching 14,000MW. He said hydel generation is low these days and is around 2,500MW but thermal and IPPs jointly are not producing more than 6,000MW.