The Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco) said cause of the shortfall has been the delay in import of oil by the Pakistan State Oil (PSO), which stretched over two days. There was a shortfall of 500MW at Kapco, 600MW at Hubco and almost 700MW at Jamshoro.

The generation of the ship-mounted Japan Power Plant Karkey (232MW) plummeted severely to a meager 24MW against its capacity of 107MW and Sapcol generated 50MW against its 110MW capacity.

Meanwhile, Faisalabad Combined Cycle Units (210MW) neither has gas nor funds to purchase diesel.

The PSO ran out of furnace oil on May 1 and was expecting a shipload of oil the same day. But the ship got delayed for two days, creating a severe crisis for Pepco. Towards the end of last month, PSO supplied only 10,000 tons of oil against a requirement of 36,000 tons.

The government, however, arranged furnace oil for three days as an emergency measure, but the shortfall rose to around 7,200MW on Monday and Tuesday.

A reduction in the supply of gas has also caused a deficit of 836MW in power generation.

Four of Pepco’s plants, Orient, Saif, Roche and Sapphire are receiving only 31 million cubic feet per day (MMcfd) each whereas their requirement is a quota of 38MMcfd. The Guddu power station is getting 200MMcfd against its quota of 290MMcfd.

It may be mentioned that the power outages have increased because of an oil and gas crisis.