Leap into darkness

A country disturbingly used to the menace that is 'loadshedding', Pakistan has had its share of power 'outages' or breakdowns as well. On Saturday night, virtually the whole country went dark once again. Amidst all kinds of rumours and memes and self-effacing jokes regarding the state of the country's power sector, people had to endure more than nine to ten hours – in some cases more – of no electricity. Thankfully, power was restored to 80 percent of the country by mid-morning Sunday, with some areas being deprived of the load for short periods, in order to manage the supply better and ensure there was no repeat of the disaster. But, of course, the chief need now is to understand what happened and what went wrong. While Energy Minister Omar Ayub tweeted various messages, the inquiry that has now been set up is what will hopefully discover the real reason and help us avoid such situations again. The blackout appears to have been caused by poor maintenance, technical errors and failure to maintain the power system, or keep in good order the organizations which run it by ensuring they have long-term, capable officials in charge.

From what we know so far, it appears that the fault which caused the entire system to falter and had a cascading effect affecting one transmission line after the other, occurred at Guddu in the Kashmore district of Sindh. The Guddu power station is a vital link to power distribution in the country. There have been previous faults in this area as well. In 2015, it was said to have been caused by heavy fog which made transmission lines vulnerable to failure and short-circuiting. This time too there are some experts who are saying fog and smog were one of the main factors in making transmission lines more vulnerable to touching each other or to creating short-circuiting, which triggered a failure across the power grid. Pakistan is one of the few countries in the world which has a national grid connected across the country. While this is a good thing and extremely useful to the nation, the problem also is that it needs to be intricately maintained to keep the entire system running and prevent the kind of blackout we saw. Other investigations are also on.

There is an argument that, while the load on the system has been increased, transmission lines and other centres have not kept pace with the demand placed by this load. In addition, the fact that LNG-run plants are not operating in central Punjab – where the load is greatest – because of the government failure to purchase LNG for some days of January, is being reported as another factor. The issue of LNG purchase has come up repeatedly both on Geo News and in this newspaper. There have also been questions about appointments to the DISCOS and to the NTDC, the organization in charge of the transmission and distribution of power across the country. There needs to be a full and non-political inquiry into the events which took place so that we can safeguard our system and ensure a fault of this magnitude which has occurred before is not repeated in the future.