Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), in line with its promise in the manifesto to end the energy crisis, has been announcing one power project after the other in the past four years.

In the last four years, the federal government has announced at least a dozen energy projects in Pakistan to meet the increasing demand of electricity and some of them are said to have been completed already.

However, critics believe, many of the power projects are hastily inaugurated by the government just for getting political mileage. Many such power projects have technical problems.

The 1200 MW LNG-based Bhikki Power Project in district Sheikhupura is the latest example, which stopped working a month after the inauguration by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on April 19.

The power plant was put to initial test run much before the Commercial Operation Date (COD). Soon after the inauguration, the plant met with technical and mechanical faults in the first opened turbine, putting a stop to any sort of power generation.

According to media reports, the Bhikki power project, is run by a non-technical government officer on a lucrative salary package of up to Rs2 million a month. The project, which was supposed to inject 717MW in the system, now faces closure. The Pakistani and Chinese engineers working to fix the issue have already failed and now German experts have been called in to rectify the fault.

Similarly, the gas turbine of 385MW Haveli Bahadur Shah LNG power plant, has reportedly been closed down due to its machinery being too advanced.

This is the second time that a power project opened in Punjab in haste has met with serious technical issues. Earlier, it was the Nandipur Power Project in district Gujranwala.

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The Nandipur project is delayed and problematic inviting criticism on the present government for investing in such a costly project and completing it in haste amid allegations of anomalies and professional negligence.

As per a recent development, the conversion of the Nandipur power plant into a gas power plant requires an added amount of Rs7 billion to the total cost. The cost of the plant has gone up to Rs65 billion now. It is thus generating extremely expensive electricity which comes to Rs15.63 per unit.

The power project was mishandled from the very beginning: the requirements were not met; its machinery was lying at the port in Karachi for several months; the project, conceived during the Pervez Musharraf regime, was hastily taken up by the sitting government in 2014 to meet the ongoing energy crisis.

"Another reason of faults in such power plants is that their generators and machinery are second hand and, therefore produce less than the given capacity," says Syed Tanzeem Hussain Naqvi, former Member (Power) of Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA).

Naqvi believes the government should keep in mind that "opening new plants with such machinery cannot resolve the energy crisis because these plants are making expensive electricity, mostly through Independent Power Producers (IPPs). The government’s inability to pay them adds to the circular debt."