Islamabad
The government is confident to eliminate power outages by January 2018, as by then, it will add 10,000 megawatts to the national grid, as it is consistently adding to the generation capacity.
By the year 2022, installed power generation capacity of the country will reach up to 53,000 megawatts after making billions of dollars public and private investment in the sector.
“By Jan 2018, there will be zero loadshedding, as there are dozens of power projects underway in public and private sectors. By end June 2018, our installed capacity will be around 30,000MW and then we will add another 3,000MW by end of the year,” Secretary Ministry of Water and Power Younus Dagha said at the 8th Annual Conference on PowerGen 2016 here Thursday. He said that currently Pakistan’s dependable installed capacity is around 20,000MW.
There are more than 18,000MW projects under construction or under consideration that include Neelum-Jhelum hydropower project of 969MW, Diamer-Bhasha Dam of 4500MW, Kohala hydel project of 1,100MW, Bunji Dam 7,100MW, Dasu hydropower project of 4,320MW, Tarbela 4th extension hydropower project 1,410MW and 5th extension of same 1,410MW. There are also other small and medium hydropower projects in private sector. Some projects are also under construction in solar, wind and other renewable sources.
Since this government came into power, running the existing power generation capacity was a challenge, and it was done with the improvement of distribution system and bringing robust monitoring system of generation, distribution and financial discipline. The recovery ratio in the country’s energy sector is 93.4 percent now - the highest in last one decade while in 2013, it was 88.7 percent. Circular debt has been capped at around 320 to 329 billion rupees for the last two years; otherwise it would have been filed up to more than 500 billion, as every month the power sector is paying around Rs14 billion to Pakistan State Oil (PSO), independent power producers (IPPs) and gad companies for providing oil, gas or electricity to the power sector.
Transmission and distribution losses are at 18 percent (lowest in last 10 years). Whereas, Aggregate Technical and Commercial (AT&C) losses are at 23.4 percent in 2015 from 28.2 percent recorded in 2014, which is unprecedented not only in Pakistan but in the region.
Earlier in 20 years, around 10,000 megawatts of generation capacity was added to the national power sector, but in 2015 alone, 12,000MW was added to the system mostly through private investment (independent power producers), as the investors had confidence that the investment will be safe and they can get good return.
In 2013, there was unpredictable loadshedding, while the industrial sector was facing power outage of 12 to 14 hours a day, but now there is zero load shedding for the sector while for domestic consumers, it is six to eight hours.
“Earlier, the system was unable to carry more than 15,500MW, but now with the improvement of the transmission and distribution system we can carry more than 17,000MW,” secretary said.
It is worth mentioning that in last several years, energy shortage had been a ‘dominant constraint’ to the economic growth and it was the reason the economy grew by less than four percent. “We have estimated that Pakistan is losing 2 percent of GDP every year due to energy crisis,” a senior official said.
