There's no end in sight

It's a burning question nowadays, whether Pakistan would ever come out of energy crisis, keeping in view the last 10 years of talks, strategies, hopes and promises of 3 different governments, but without any fruitful results. "I spent 90 percent of my time in solving these issues and I am working hard. As a result, I have less time to work for the development of the country," Nawaz Sharif, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, has recently spoken these words on working against terrorism and power crisis in Pakistan as his top priorities. Even after two years of his government, Pakistan is still facing a huge power crisis which has for long curtailed the country's overall development and progress and also made people's daily lives miserable. Unfortunately, there is more to come and there is no end in sight anytime soon.
Of course, the government will always put a strong face with a road map for a bright future, without any power or energy crisis in Pakistan. They will always tell us about strong decisions and utmost commitment and when Prime Minister of a country says he is allotting a huge part of his time to tackle "power crisis", no one can deny the government's seriousness or commitment. Ironically, if we try to find a solution for Pakistan's power crisis, in last 10 years specially, we would find numerous suggestions, guidelines, analyses, reports from within government and outside. So far nothing has worked though.
The problem is not capacity, as installed generation capacity of 24,375MW is greater than the peak summer demand. But peak availability of around 16,000 MW against the peak demand of 20,500MW is the real picture and in the last 5 years, a deficit of 4000 to 6000MW, has always been there.
There is another interesting aspect: thermal power plants are the biggest source of power generation in Pakistan (around 16,000 MW or 67% of the total installed capacity). These thermal power plants use furnace oil, high speed diesel and natural gas as fuels. Since July 2014, global oil prices have declined by roughly 50%, providing a great relief for an oil importing country like Pakistan. Power consumers are also getting a relief in their utility bills through fuel price adjustments. This current scenario means that because of lower oil prices, Pakistan can produce more electricity from its thermal power plants at lower costs. But that's not the case, still when electricity demand has not touched its peak, against the demand of 13,500 MW, production has been limited to 9,700MW and we are facing of an acute shortage of over 3,500 MW because our thermal power plants are not utilising full capacity nor taking advantage of this huge dip in oil prices. Which is beyond belief and no one knows why.
To start with, the problem is neither just shortage of power nor availability of information. Data is also available in abundance, there are daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly reports of what's going on in power sector of Pakistan. And we are not short of organisations and human resources also. In fact, there are 29 different departments dealing with energy sector in Pakistan, many are for power sector alone, often creating more hindrance than any help. NEPRA in its State of Industry Report 2014 noted, " While reviewing progress on the reform process in power sector, initiated in the early nineties, NEPRA considers that the objectives under the reform agenda could not be achieved and the major reason for this failure is the continued role of PEPCO and the ministries, which have been functioning as the proxy regulators of the sector thereby defeating the very spirit of reforms." It has become a convenient choice for our government to create an organisation, scrap it and then start again. The government is also obsessed with creating new Laws and Regulations one after another, and that has made Pakistan the 7th most legislative nation on earth. Ministry of Water and Power, WAPDA, PEPCO, Distribution, Transmission, Generation companies and NEPRA, all have their Rules/Regulations/Standards from execution till monitoring. Without a doubt, there are multiple reasons for power crisis in Pakistan, but unfortunately, non implementation of already established Rules -in true letter and spirit- is one of the most important missing link.
And for implementation of Rules, accountability holds the key. But our way has thus far been that either we forgive everything or have the harshest punishment. During the period of last government we witnessed this mentality when a federal minister tried his best to wipe Ogra out of the system. It has to start at gross root level, a blind eye towards smaller mistakes often leads to bigger problems and that's what is happening from long time. Why a particular standard, rule or regulation was not achieved or followed? Instead of finding an answer, for one reason or another, we tend to ignore the real causes behind such failure, and jump to creation of new sets of rules.
"Writing laws is easy, but governing is difficult." as Leo Tolstoy, a great Russian novelist and philosopher of 20th century, revealed this in a simple way. On the other hand, Rules without implementation fail to consolidate the much needed Rule of Law.
There are no doubts of hard work and resilience of the government to put an end to this power crisis but if government really wish to make a difference, it will have to start with proper implementation of already established Rules.