EDITORIAL: Relief from the government’s recent promise to “end power outages soon” because better inflow into rivers brought a surprise 2,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity into the system was short-lived, after all, as just two days later the nation woke up to the news that the 969MW Neelum-Jhelum power plant has had to be shut down due to “major cracks in its tailrace tunnel”.

It’s too soon to tell how long the investigation into the seriousness of the problem will take, considering its deep and long channels, some of which are under large mountains. So it’s also going to be a while before it’s known when the plant would be up and running at full capacity again. Till then, all tall promises about ending load-shedding and all that will simply have to take a back seat, as usual.

Yet the Neelum-Jhelum breakdown is troubling for reasons beyond just worsening the power shortage. The 969MW hydropower project, completed at an estimated approved cost of Rs508 billion, has always been riddled with problems.

Its construction was taken in hand in 2002 after 21 years of delay and completed finally in early 2018, but not before endless cost overruns and missed deadlines that meant that the government was always revising its budgetary and energy calculations.

And barely after four years of functioning, in which it often exceeded its installed capacity and produced 1,040MW, it has broken down due to a fault that could well point to much deeper engineering flaws.

While a lot clearly remains to be done, the government has tried to appear front-foot about the mishap. After duly explaining why the major hydropower project had to be taken offline and that the exact nature of the problem would become clear soon enough, the energy minister tried to deflect growing concern by assuring everyone, as always, that there was now enough supply in the grid to rule out an immediate emergency.

Fresh rains had, in fact, improved the power generation capacity of major dams, said Power Minister Khurram Dastgir, and added that cheap Afghan coal, which had started arriving in the country, would also help meet the demand gap.

Such words would indeed be comforting if previous claims hadn’t turned out to be completely hollow. For, the government has been promising about ending load-shedding, within days, ever since it took power. Yet the on-ground situation has been deteriorating to the point that exporters are beginning to lose orders because of availability, rather lack of it, and cost of power.

No doubt the government is forced to keep a straight face through all this because the opposition is already grilling it on the streets because of runaway inflation and a collapsing economy. The last thing it needs is more noise about the power situation to poison voters when it doesn’t have more than a year in office, which means for it the election is never too far away.

The best thing to do in such situations is to ensure complete transparency, which would also help it keep a lid on the urge to issue statements now and then that raise people’s hopes unnecessarily.

Once everybody understands the real demand-supply situation as the power ministry faces it, they’ll also be able to tell when an administration is being honest with them and when one is taking them for a ride. And businesses, especially exporters that help bring precious foreign exchange to the national kitty, will be able to plan that much better.

For now, though, the Neelum-Jhelum fiasco must be explained thoroughly to the public and also addressed immediately. The promise to make people’s lives better by ending, at least reducing, load-shedding must not be abandoned because one of the most important power producers ran into an unforeseen fault. It should, rather, make the government run stress tests on the whole system to rule out any more complications in the future.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022