People of Karachi continue to endure long hours of load shedding despite the decrease in demand of electricity following the first spell of monsoon rains in the city on Saturday which turned the weather pleasant and brought the mercury down by atleast four degrees centigrade.
The Met Office record shows that before Saturday’s shower the city’s temperature was at 35 degrees centigrade. Post-rain, the mercury has not gone beyond 33 degree centigrade with 31 degree centigrade being recorded on Wednesday.
The city’s weather nowadays remains partly cloudy with the Met Office forecasting that the maximum temperature will range between 31 and 33 degrees centigrade during the next 24 hours along with chances of light rain.
Officials at K-Electric (KE) concede that the weekend’s rainfall has cut demand for electricity in the metropolis at least by 200 megawatts.
Talking to Pakistan Today, K-Electric Chief of Staff Osama Qureshi said, “The household demand has shrunk by 10 to 15 percent after the rains,” but added that the people of Karachi would still have to bear load-shedding which he said, lasts for seven and half hours routinely.
Dropping from peak summer’s 3,000 megawatts, the city’s three-pronged demand for electricity currently stands at 2,500 megawatts, of which 650 megawatts is supplied by the federal government through Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) and the balance is produced by the privately-run utility.
KE claims to generate at least 1,700 megawatts to cater to the city’s industrial, commercial and household consumers.
Osama said that the consequent reduced demand would not benefit Karachiites because “our criterion to carry out load-shedding is based on line losses and power theft and not demand.”
The ratio of power theft and line losses, the KE official said, was still ranging from 7 to 50 percent in the city of 18 million people.
“Gadap, Lyari, Liaquatabad and Malir stand the worst neighborhoods with 47 to 50 percent line losses,” he claimed.
While the middle-class residents of Gulshan Iqbal are stealing up to 12 percent electricity, the elite of posh neighborhoods like Defence do the same at a rate of seven percent. “This percentage was 28 when we had taken over the company,” Osama said.
Moreover, the recent rains have also damaged some 1,000 electricity wires of KE, Osama said, adding that the rain rendered at least 12 underground cables faulty and some 16 of the city’s total 20,000 transformers burnt.
The official said that KE is rolling up sleeves to shed more power load during the forthcoming “second summer”. “To us, the months of September and October constitute second summer when the demand would again increase up to 2,900MW,” Osama said.
“In Ramazan the demand was 2,800MW and we were hardly able to manage,” he said.
Given the rulers’ past indifference toward energy generation for over a decade, the masses are left at the mercy of the heavens that, the Met Office says, would keep the weather “hot and very humid” in most parts of the country during the week ahead.
The citizens, however, can also help themselves by refraining from wasting and using the most-needed electricity illegally.
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