Power theft to take long time before disappearing: Asif

Says it is not possible to eliminate circular debt from energy chain.

ISLAMABAD: Minister of Water and Power Khawaja Asif has acknowledged that the government has not been able to stop power theft in one year and insisted that it will take a long time to end line losses and theft.

It was not possible to eliminate circular debt from the energy sector, he said while talking to the media here on Tuesday after a meeting of the Pak-China Energy Planning Working Group.

Asif repeated the old threat that the government would cut off power supply to the consumers that were not paying their bills in an attempt to improve electricity supply to the people that were meeting their obligations.

“We are taking action against power defaulters,” he stressed. “Governments and departments in provinces are not paying bills and the central government wants to deduct these bills at source through a federal adjustor despite resistance by the provinces.”



Asif announced that Pakistan would initiate mega projects of 7,000 megawatts in the current year with the assistance of China. “People will start getting electricity from these projects in 2017,” he said, believing the country would see economic prosperity with the end of power outages.

Earlier speaking to the working group, Asif said the government had been able to enhance power generation in order to bridge the demand and supply gap and ensure energy security.

The government is giving top priority to investment in power generation and is focusing on wind, solar and coal-based projects for achieving a better energy mix.

“For the first time, we will offer the facility of transmission lines to power producers and we have done planning for that as well as designing of power plants,” he said. Such measures would create confidence among Chinese investors and bring investment in the energy sector, he hoped.

“We are committed to working in Pakistan and will soon initiate energy projects, the special energy working group has been formed in this regard,” said China’s Vice Administrator of National Energy Zhang Yuqing.

He said China would invest $6 billion in the proposed Pak-China Economic Corridor.

China would invest in power projects of a total of 21,960MW capacity in Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 16^th, 2014.

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