NEPRA rejects power doomsday prophecy

A spokesperson for National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) has contradicted the news items which appeared in a section of press on February 24, enunciating continuance of power outages across the country by 2020.

The spokesperson said the reports while referring to NEPRA State of Industry Report 2014 have completely failed to divulge the context in which the matter has been discussed in the NEPRA report.

The relevant tables and the accompanying paragraphs provide Peak Time Statistics about installed capacity and the projected demands in NTDC and K-Electric systems.

It may be noted that while the peak demand in the NTDC system stands at 23,242 MW in 2014-15, the installed capacity is almost equal to it as 23,928 MW. Over the coming years, it is planned to add new power generation capacity as indicated in the report: 593 MW 2015-16, 3380 MW 2016-17, 4261 MW 2017-18, 3561 MW 2018-19 and 3940 MW 2019-20.

Resultantly, the installed capacity in the NTDC’s system is expected to be 39,663 MW against a demand of 28,773 MW by 2019-20.

The spokesperson further said NEPRA report in succeeding paragraph touches upon the gap between the expected capability of the plants and the demand, only at the peak time. Even such a gap at peak time gradually reduces and it is projected to be less than 1000 MW by 2018-19, whereas in 2019-20 a complete turnaround has been projected with a surplus of more than 1100 MW at the peak time, the spokesperson added.

It is also to be noted that the report in the same paragraph emphasises that timely completion of projects, performance improvements and elimination of fuel constraints will provide relief to consumers.

The spokesperson said that nowhere NEPRA Report refers to load shedding as has been referred by the media reports. By not providing underlying facts and ignoring the subsequent observations, the news reports have presented a “distorted picture”.