Tripping over

There is to be a “fact-finding committee” to investigate the most serious power breakdown for at least a year

The blackout that enveloped half of the country at 9.28am on 16^th May was exactly what the government did not want to have happened. It could hardly have come at a more inopportune time. In many places it lasted until the late afternoon or early evening and in that time voting choices may have been on many minds. Virtually all of Punjab, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Azad Jammu and Kashmir, as well as parts of Sindh and Balochistan, went dark, the result of a technical fault which occurred along the North-South power corridor which tripped the system in five seconds. Power is now mostly restored though there are many anecdotal reports of low voltage and intermittent power outages. There is to be a “fact-finding committee” to investigate the reasons for this, the most serious power breakdown for at least a year.

A fact-finding committee seems something of an irrelevance given that most of the facts surrounding this latest power failure are already in the public domain. The national grid was an accident waiting to happen, run as it is on an adhoc basis with a management that is cobbled together on a pro-tem basis. There is no dedicated power industry professional at the top of the system to take control when crisis management was imperative. The secretary of the power ministry is a bureaucrat who lacks the power systems experts as his subordinates that could have headed off the failure. Right across the range of offices and ministries that have a hand on power system management, there are acting officers who are generalists rather than specialists and there are turf wars between the various power entities as they compete for power other than of an electrical nature.

Other faults lie in the technical fundamentals and changes in the makeup of the “basket” of power generators and distributors. Hydropower has declined and it used to be a key stabiliser, today wind, solar and bagasse generated power is said to have produced a paradigm shift in the internal harmonics of the system which has not been effectively planned for or managed. And all fixed before the election? Probably not.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 18^th, 2018.

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