Total darkness

The entire country went dark for several hours over the weekend, prompting speculation ranging from war, natural disaster, or a military coup, and going up to the End of Days. The actual cause, according to the government, was far less ‘exciting’, but arguably more worrying. A fault at a single power plant cascaded and caused the nationwide outage. Yes, our electricity supply system is so frail that a fault at a single power plant knocked out the entire country.

It is indeed a miracle that the outage did not lead to losses of lives, as reports so far suggest that hospitals were able to make do with backup generators, despite the length of the outage in several areas. It is also ‘fortunate’ that the outage occurred on a weekend winter night, rather than during a workday morning or a summer night, when economic damage and risk to human life would have been even higher.

Energy Minister Omar Ayub immediately tried to blame the previous PML-N government for not fixing the power sector. Specifically, he said the PTI’s predecessors had not done enough to improve power transmission system while they added to the generation capacity of the country. Never mind that Ayub has been the Energy Minister for more than two years. Never mind that Prime Minister Imran Khan recently said that the time for passing the buck is over. For Ayub, it is still someone else’s fault.

Interestingly, former PML-N finance minister Miftah Ismail was quick to point out that the incumbent government did not perform maintenance at Guddu and other “critical points” over the summer. At the same time, experts have pointed at fuel supply problems for power plants and weaknesses such as the susceptibility of power lines to fog. The former refers to winter gas shortages eating into the available supply for power plants, and the latter refers to ‘earthing’ of poorly maintained power lines during fog and frost conditions. While we can confirm that both of these issues existed during the tenures of every government in our lifetimes, it is again inexcusable that two years in, the incumbents try to blame the other guys.

Other issues that have been mentioned include failure to adopt new technologies within the existing supply stations, or to update management in general, and fail-safe protocols in particular, as new generation plants come online. Experts have also noted that a cascading failure should not have occurred due to just one problem at just one plant. According to them, power management plans are designed to allow for multiple faults, which should only cause localised, or at worst, regional blackouts, rather than a nationwide one. They believe that a cascading failure would require many problems at many locations, which is not what the official story has been so far.

And while seven employees of the Central Power Generation Company have already been suspended for showing negligence, the government has ordered an inquiry. To the incumbent government’s credit, we have seen that inquiries into other crises in the past two years have been made public, with many big fish named. Unfortunately, the focus on transparency has not been accompanied by an acceptable degree of focus on action. Those big fish continue to swim free. While we are reasonably confident that this inquiry will be honest, we have little evidence that its findings will result in any major improvements being made or significant punishments doled out.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 12^th, 2021.

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