“Electricity transmission woes”, reference BR “Markets & Corporates” (14 Jan) does not cover the real issues. The latest power breakdown is certainly NOT the present government’s fault, though we seem to blame them for everything going wrong all around us. Years of neglect and poor planning will result in such systems’ collapse and unfortunately, no quick gimmicky will resolve the serious issues at hand.

Our basic decision to base our planning on few huge thermal power sources (exception for hydel projects due to location) on main grid is not only out-of-date but highly risky as these systems are susceptible to remote manipulation due to lack of cyber security and who knows what really happened that night? Was it a “test” of how easily we can disable the whole country’s power generation and distribution? We need to study and understand the latest model of safe and secure power sources and distribution. We simply are not planning for the changed environment in which distributed generation (both renewable and combined heat and power systems with very high thermal efficiencies) have to be the norm and the archaic main electricity generation plants being the back-bone of national power transmission system is simply unworkable!

(To be continued)

ENGR. AINUL ABEDIN (KARACHI)

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021