Massive power outages and prolonged load shedding lasting anywhere between six and eight hours every day is expected in most parts of the country.
Officials familiar with the government’s deliberations on energy policy say that urban areas, including the largest cities in the country, are expected to face up to six hours of power outages and rural areas up to eight hours. These rules, however, often grossly underestimate the extent of load shedding in most parts of the country, particularly in Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, where outages often last as long as 20 hours a day.
The government’s inability to tackle the energy crisis appears to have worsened the problem. Industrial areas, which had hitherto been exempted from power outages, will now face up to eight hours a day without electricity during the summer, as well as severely constrained natural gas supply for those industrial units large enough to have their own gas-fired captive power plants.
In theory, the country has 23,538 megawatts of installed capacity, but at a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Energy (CCE) on March 3, officials from the Water and Power Ministry all but admitted that the 6,678 MW of installed capacity at the state-owned thermal power plants (collectively referred to as ‘Gencos’) are so badly managed as to have been rendered effectively unavailable for supply.
In order to manage the country’s energy needs with over a quarter of electricity generation capacity offline, the government had introduced a “load management programme”, which involves aggressive conservation technique that often shut down electricity to commercial areas after a certain time, thus slowing down economic activity. Yet despite these draconian measures, the government still expects peak demand in June 2015 to hit 16,742 MW which is higher than the expected available supply of 16,441 MW.
Load shedding: Impossible to end loadshedding before 2020: NEPRA
