Power outages to end well before 2018 elections, claims ministry

Says load-shedding will vanish from the country in Nov this year

ISLAMABAD: With the expected start of over 5,000-megawatt power plants this year, the Ministry of Water and Power has given assurances to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that load-shedding will come to an end in November, well ahead of general elections in mid-2018.

Still, the prime minister has issued directives to the ministry to make all-out efforts and do away with the blackouts much earlier in the summer of 2017.



The government has already declared repeatedly that it will be able to end load-shedding in 2018. However, the areas where recovery of electricity bills stands low and power theft is high will continue to face outages.

The Ministry of Water and Power made the commitment to ending load-shedding in November 2017 during a high-level meeting chaired by the prime minister.



“The premier appreciated efforts of the power ministry that has taken several measures to bring efficiency and improvement in the power sector,” a senior ministry official told The Express Tribune.

According to the official, power consumers are currently facing load-shedding for three hours a day in urban areas and four hours in rural areas. Some areas of the country were facing no outages, he said.

However, consumers in high-loss areas - where bill recovery is low and theft is high - are enduring power cuts for longer periods.

In the meeting, Water and Power Secretary Younus Dagha assured participants that the load-shedding schedule would be kept in place till October 2017 and from next month outages would vanish from the country except for the high-loss areas.

The prime minister, while stressing that load-shedding should end in the summer instead of winter, directed the Ministry of Water and Power to present comprehensive data of load-shedding in the country.

“Different projects will add 3,387MW to the national grid before summer this year,” the official said.

Of these, Chashma-3 and 4 nuclear power units will bring 340MW each, Guddu station 300MW, Nandipur power plant 300MW, Bhikki plant 350MW, Sahiwal coal-based plant 660MW, wind and bagasse power plants 550MW, Patrind hydroelectric power plant 147MW and Faisalabad plant 250MW.

According to the official, transmission lines for electricity supply from these plants, except for the Patrind plant, have already been laid.



Apart from these, 760MW Haveli Bahadur Shah power plant, 660MW Sahiwal coal-based plant and 350MW wind and bagasse-based plants will start operation and add a cumulative 1,770MW to the national grid during the summer of 2017.

Transmission lines for the Sahiwal plant have been laid whereas transmission lines for the Haveli Bahadur Shah plant and wind/bagasse plants will be completed by February and March respectively.

The official revealed that an additional 5,839MW would come online by March 2018. This includes 760MW Balloki, 1,410MW Tarbela-4, 1,320MW Port Qasim coal-based plant, 500MW Bhikki combined-cycle plant, 440MW Haveli Bahadur Shah plant, 440MW Balloki combined-cycle plant and 969MW Neelum-Jhelum hydroelectric power plant.

Transmission lines for these projects will be completed before the start of their operations.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Water and Power said power supply from the Guddu project had been added to the national grid in 2016 and the Chashma unit-3 became operational in October last year.

In addition to these, he said, 300MW was added by the Quaid-e-Azam solar park in 2016 and at the end of the year, aggregate power generation stood at 20,857MW.

He acknowledged that work on the 1,320MW Sahiwal coal-based power plants was under way and production would start in 2017. “The power ministry has taken steps to remove hurdles in the way of private investment in the power sector,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 4^th, 2017.

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