ISLAMABAD, June 29: Electricity consumers in the country, excluding Karachi, are facing over 700mw of un-announced loadshedding daily in peak hours for the last few days owing to power generation and transmission capacity constraints, it is learnt.
A senior Wapda official confirmed on telephone from Lahore that a major shortage of over 500mw was because of transmission and disbursement constraints and another 200mw shortage was because of generation capacity constraints.
Wapda sources said the shortage would further go up next year as no power generation project was scheduled to be completed before next fiscal year.
An official said President Musharraf had last year allowed Wapda to set up three power plants of 450-mw each in Faisalabad, Nandipur and Chichuki Malyan by raising loans from the market but the ministry of water and power and prime minister’s secretariat changed the decision, quoting the government’s covenants with the World Bank that barred Wapda from installing thermal stations.
However, recently Wapda has been allowed to install in Chichuki Malyan a 450-mw thermal power plant on emergency basis, for which tenders have been advertised in the newspapers.
The official said one reason for not allowing Wapda to set up plants was that the cost of a megawatt of electricity produced by the plants was estimated at about $0.7 million compared with private sector’s cost of over $1 million, that could have opened a new debate on faulty power policy.
There are at least four major areas where demand is much higher but power cannot be transmitted due to capacity constraints in terms of transmission lines and grid stations.
For example, 500kv grid stations of Lahore-Sheikhupura, Gatti-Faisalabad, Islamabad-Rawat and Tarbela are overloaded, resulting in loadshedding in the rural areas of Lahore, Sheikhupura, Faisalabad, Rawalpindi-Islamabad and Azad Kashmir. Telephone contacts in Bagh and Rawalakot areas of Azad Kashmir tell that power supply remains suspended there for over five hours a day for the last many days, usually in peak hours.
The official said on Monday maximum power supply stood at about 13,070mw and total demand at about 13,900-mw.
Additional 400mw of power was available in the system but could not be transmitted due to grid capacity constraints, he added.
He said most of the thermal plants both in public and private sectors were providing maximum supply but hydel production was about 5,000mw against the capacity of about 6,600mw due to low water releases from dams for irrigation.
The sources said there were two reasons for suspending electricity supply to rural areas. First, to ensure uninterrupted supply to industrial and commercial consumers, most of which were in urban centres.
Secondly, because power distribution companies charge much lower tariffs from domestic consumers whose majority lives in rural areas. Thus, by suspending supply to rural areas on priority, Wapda’s revenue loss remains minimal.
For example, a shut down of 100 units in a city will cause a revenue loss of about Rs500 compared to Rs270 in a rural area.
The official said the rise in electricity demand has increased by about 12 per cent during the 2005-06 fiscal compared with a normal 5-6 per cent growth in the last six years.
Last year, the demand growth was more than eight per cent, he said.
He said that major growth in consumption was mainly because of over 20 per cent growth in household and commercial use due to increasing use of electric appliances like airconditioners and fridges as a result of leasing facilities available for consumer goods.
