The Ministry of Water and Power has reportedly commenced an unscheduled load management programme disguised as maintenance work just to show to the Prime Minister that the load-shedding duration was just two hours across the country. People in rural areas are facing unannounced outages lasting as many as 10 hour while urban areas faces four-hour-long power cuts.
Power Distribution Companies (Discos), in their recent advertisements in newspapers announced a two-hour-long load-shedding schedule in various areas, but people in rural areas are facing merciless load shedding. Sources told Business Recorder that power generation during the day time was about 8800 megawatts whereas during night time, the generation was 10,000MW against the demand which fluctuated between 12,000MW and 13,000MW, showing a shortfall of between 1,200 and 3000MW.
"If the Water and Power Ministry distributes 3000MW shortfall across the board the duration should be six hours for general consumers as well as industry," the sources said. According to sources, Secretary Water and Power Nargis Sethi was "terrorising" mostly acting CEOs of Discos to contain the duration of load shedding at just only two hours a day despite knowing that the shortfall was not less than 3000MW.
"CEOs invariably agree to do Nargis Sethi's bidding, but it is simply not possible to meet her targets, so they resorted to load management disguised as 'maintenance' by switching off 20 per cent feeders between four and five hours every day," the sources maintained. Most of the affairs of power sector are being run by the District Management Group (DMG) which the Federal Minister felt was the cure for all problems. The sources said Discos were used to disguising load shedding as a 'fault in the system' at the cost of domestic industry which is experiencing 8-10 hours of load shedding.
An official said that almost 3,400MW thermal power was out of the system because of the non-availability of furnace oil and gas, as Ministry of Water and Power has failed to guarantee fuel to operate thermal power plants at full capacity. Annual canal closure will also add to the miseries of industrial and other consumers from December 26 this year when outflows from the Tarbela reservoir will be reduced to 10,000 cusecs from 35,000 cusecs and Mangla from 27,000 cusecs to 5,000 cusecs, implying hydel generation will be about 800-900MW against the current generation of 3,000MW. Another official of Water and Power Ministry told Business Recorder that the power supply position had worsened over the past two days because of technical faults in some thermal power plants, adding that the situation had now improved.
"We are facing up to 12 hours unannounced load shedding and no one is ready to tell us reasons for such prolonged outages," said Muhammad Razak, a consumer from Gujrat. On the other hand, local industry maintains that it is on the verge of collapse as energy (power and gas) is not available and the government is not ready to hear them.
Local industry has been informed in clear words that there will be no gas for 45 days onward from December 15, 2012 just to accommodate domestic consumers because of election year. "What I can say is that the incumbent government wants to destroy local industry within its tenure," commented one stakeholder on condition of anonymity.
Chairman of All Pakistan Textile Mills Association Ahsan Bashir said that the Ministry of Water and Power had not even bothered to invite representatives of the textile sector to discuss ways and means to deal with the power crisis. Minister for Water and Power Ahmad Mukhtar is also a member of APTMA.
Comments
Comments are closed.