Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday appreciating the good work of Ministry of Water and Power officials reiterated that reliance on costly fuel for power generation will be reduced a great deal by the end of the tenure of the present government.
According to a PM House statement, he was chairing a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Energy and reviewed ongoing power projects including clean energy, coal fired, hydro electric and LNG power plants that will add electricity to the grid during the year 2017 and 2018.
The meeting held here at the PM House deliberated on future power generation projects to cater for the ever increasing energy requirements of the country.
The status of the establishment of new transmission lines was also discussed at length in addition to streamlining the power distribution system.
The PM said that the country was gripped by the energy crisis when the present government came into power; today the situation has changed significantly.
There is now zero load-shedding for the industrial sector and load-shedding for the urban and rural areas has substantially and gradually been reduced, the prime minister added.
Our holistic reforms in the energy sector and efforts for generating additional power through diversifying energy generation will help in meeting the country’s energy requirements in the future, the prime minister said.
The prime minister observed with satisfaction that these endeavours of the present government have earned significant recognition and acknowledgement the world over.
He added that the present government has done more for power generation projects than has been done in the last twenty years.
Nawaz Sharif said that the focus of the government right from the first day was to resolve the energy crisis in the country.
He said the government was determined to provide cheaper electricity to the people and expressed confidence that load-shedding will soon be resigned to the history books.
He added that the government will keep on exploring new power generation projects on both micro and macro levels to ensure sustained and uninterrupted electricity for our future generations, a duty that previous government were unable to fulfil. Earlier, Secretary Water and Power briefed the meeting and informed them that the circular debt has been capped, recoveries were satisfactory, and line losses have been minimized.
Transmission and distribution lines projects are also on track. The bottlenecks in the distribution system were being removed to ensure uninterrupted supply to consumers, he added.