KARACHI:
In today’s world, energy is crucial for economic and social progress in most developing countries including Pakistan. It is the basic input in production and consumption activities. In Pakistan, reliable energy is important to support industries, agriculture, trade and transportation. Unfortunately, global upheavals and increasing demands have caused an energy crisis.
The Ukraine-Russia war has aggravated the crisis as Russia is using its energy assets as political leverage to find new economic partners. Pakistan is in a difficult position as the country’s own energy resources are depleting and it cannot afford expensive energy imports amid an internal economic crisis. The power breakdown on Monday can be partly blamed on the worsening energy crisis. The entire country came to a standstill as millions of homes, schools, factories, hospitals and offices were left without power. In a bid to conserve Pakistan’s rapidly dwindling fuel supplies, electricity is often cut off during low usage hours overnight, especially in the winter when demand is highest.
The energy minister claimed that the outage was triggered by frequency variation and voltage fluctuation. This means that the power grid needs to be upgraded. However, the government, which has lurched from one International Monetary Fund bail-out package to the next just to keep the country afloat, says that kind of investment simply is not possible. The outage affected huge swathes of the country, from the financial hub of Karachi to the capital Islamabad. This is the second major outage in four months. In the recent case too, power capacity is not the culprit. Pakistan has enough installed power capacity to meet demand. However, it lacks the resources to run its oil-and-gas-powered plants. The country’s oil and gas resources are almost completely depleted, making Pakistan dependent on energy imports.
Syed Tahir Rashdi
Shahdadpur
Published in The Express Tribune, January 26th, 2023.
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