Electricity: either for the consumers or the mills

In order to facilitate the textile sector, Pakistan Electric Power Company (PEPCO) has increased load shedding for domestic and commercial consumers, sources told Pakistan Today on Thursday.
Meanwhile protests also raged all over the city as angry citizens took to street against this recent development. The protestors marched outside WAPDA House and demanded of the government to reduce load shedding. The security guards closed down the gates to save the building from the protesting citizens on Egerton Road.
Police was also reported to have batton-charged protesters in various areas including Wahdat Road, Township, Egerton Road and Johar Town.
The power production from Independent Power Producers (IPPs) has also dropped sharply in the last two days, taking the outage hours to 12-16 hours per day. The power shortfall has also crossed 6,000MW. “We do not have an Aladdin’s lamp to fix the issue, either the consumers will get power or the mills will,” a PEPCO official said.
Sources said PEPCO had no option but to increase outage time for the domestic users only to accommodate textile sector. President Asif Ali Zardari had instructed PEPCO to exempt textile sector from the outages but the company does not have enough power therefore it had to increase load shedding for the domestic sector. “We do not have enough power production and there is no other option but to increase the outage time for the domestic and commercial users,” said a senior official of PEPCO adding in the recent days the power production from IPPs had also decreased sharply.
The consumers were facing six to eight hours of load shedding some three days ago but as soon the electricity was diverted to textile sector, the duration of outages crossed 12 hours in a day.
At the same time the electricity production from IPPs also dropped and power shortfall crossed 6,000MW on Thursday. IPPs produced only 5,088MW while production from hydel generation remained around 2,900MW. Interestingly, on Monday the production from IPPs remained 5,804MW thus there has been clear drop of 800MW. “Both of these factors caused huge load shedding in the country,” the PEPCO official added.