Power breakdowns are not uncommon in Pakistan but the outage the country’s southern region experienced on Thursday has raised some major questions about the way the concerned authorities are managing the power sector. Several cities in Balochistan, Punjab, and Sindh remained without electricity for several hours. This happened just a few days after Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif visited Thar and assured the nation that the country was on its way to get rid of its electricity woes. In one fell swoop, the electricity blackout suddenly removed around 8,000MW of power from the system plunging large parts of the country in darkness. Such incidents have been happening previously too but after each such blackout the citizens of Pakistan receive new assurances that a thorough investigation would take place to ascertain the causes of the power failure at that large scale. Every time this massive disruption happens in the electricity supply, the national power grid comes under stress and then apparently no major steps are taken to prevent such failures happening so regularly.
Within this year it was the second massive power failure – in the beginning of 2022, the Guddu power station developed some serious glitches and the country found itself in darkness once again. That was one of the worst power failures in the country’s history with only one-tenths of the country’s population with electricity while the remaining were left wondering what had happened. In the past decade or so, such power failures have become a regular occurrence all the while as successive governments have promised investigations and remedial measures. It appears that no contingency plan is ever prepared or implemented which is why it takes several hours and sometimes even a day before power supply is restored in the country. And those occupying higher offices in the power sector are always able to circumvent any responsibility for such massive power failures. Most of the inquiries conducted in such matters never see the light of the day and gather dust somewhere or simply put aside.
Successive governments have been procrastinating on some vital issues while trying to solve merely immediate problems on an ad hoc basis. Pakistan needs adequate and appropriate investment in the power sector that has been suffering from multiple problems for decades now. The structural problems in the power sector are severe. The data shows that each government’s approach to the power sector has focused exclusively on increasing generation capacity without addressing the serious problems in the transmission and distribution infrastructure. The power grid cannot manage more electricity generation without a serious upgrade. But upgrading the grid is both expensive and makes no headlines for politicians. Moreover, the circular debt situation continues to open yet another Pandora’s box. Power sector reform is not about adding megawatts to power production capacity. It is about creating a regulatory framework that can soothe the massive losses that both private and public sector power companies are incurring. Year after year, we wait on the announcement of loadshedding schedules, with no end in sight to the structural crisis that besets Pakistan’s power generation and distribution system. Major questions such as why line losses and non-payment issues cannot be resolved and why the transmission system cannot be improved should be on the list of the government’s priorities.