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| July 26, 2007 | Thursday | Rajab 10, 1428 |
KARACHI: Prolonged power cuts add to consumers’ summer woes
KARACHI, July 25: Sweltering in hot and humid weather conditions with mercury shooting up to above 37 degrees Celsius, residents of Defence Phase-I and II kept calling Dawn on Wednesday to know that what actually had rendered them without electricity for several hours at a stretch while power consumers from almost all areas experienced a load-shedding spanning one hour to one-and-a-half hour twice or thrice since Tuesday night.
Even after restoring power supply to the affected Defence areas after six hours, the KESC officials concerned chose to keep the cause of the breakdown secret.
Outraged by the KESC officials’ non-responsive attitude, the callers asserted that the utility was bound to inform its consumers about the cause of a breakdown of long duration as well as a tentative deadline to complete the repair work.
However, they lamented, the people at the local KESC complaint centre were mostly not responding to their frantic calls and even if any of them obliged someone by lifting the telephone, the soothing reply would be that repair of some cable fault was under way and that the power supply would be restored soon.
There were conflicting claims about the cause of suspension of power supply to Defence areas. A KESC official stated that the grid station feeding the area had developed a fault. However, another KESC staffer maintained that some feeders had been closed due to overloading. Yet another KESC man suggested that the breakdown was caused by a fire at the grid station, which was eventually closed.
The worst sufferers among the KESC consumers were the residents of Askari-III who experienced suspension of power supply up to 30 hours, the breakdown having been blamed on a cable fault.
Apart from the breakdowns, the utility had to meet a shortfall of over 200MW in power generation for which it resorted to applying load-shedding of up to two hours or more across the city on a rotation basis. The KESC also defied its own commitment made publicly with the government that load-shedding would not be carried out in night hours.
The shortfall in power generation persists apparently because the Korangi Thermal Power Plant could not be revived several days after it broke down whereas output of the Bin Qasim Plant remained marginal.
The KESC, not ready to own the responsibility of persisting power breakdowns and load-shedding, insists that Siemens must be held responsible for the deepening power crisis, arguing that the firm was not fulfilling its obligations under the six-year operation and management agreement it had signed with the new KESC management in November 2005.
Sources said that Siemens had no track-record of operating electricity generation and distribution networksThe KESC’s power generation capacity has saturated over the last one-and-a-half year while its distribution system has collapsed in spite of the Siemens claim of having activated an action plan for a cost-efficient generation of a maximized number of units and transmission system reliability. Line losses are constantly swelling and there have been widespread complaints about metering system. The much orchestrated pragmatic action plan for enhancing the KESC’s generation capacity is not in sight either.
Under the Siemens’s advice, the KESC changed its 11KV distribution system to 10KV system to overcome some technical problems. However, this resulted in an increased pressure and ultimately damage to consumers’ electrical appliances, which are no more getting full current, i.e. 220 volts.
Under the agreement, a copy of which has been obtained by Dawn, the Siemens “will at all times employ at least eight full-time expatriate specialists and 15 full-time local specialists in operation services to provide services in such a manner to make the company profitable within the first two years.”
The sources say Siemens would remain beneficiary if the agreement was terminated after November this year, as envisaged in Clause 7.4 of the agreement. Under the Clause 8.3, if the agreement is terminated by the KESC in terms of Clause 7.4, it “shall pay compensation to Siemens for each year of the remaining term of the agreement in an amount which is equal in aggregate to the lower of 16 million dollars or 65 per cent of the fixed fee for the remaining term of agreement.”
It seems that the agreement had been designed to the advantage of the Siemens, and not the KESC as is evident from the KESC’s acknowledgement that Siemens had structured the services fee in a manner that the latter could only be fairly compensated if the agreement remained valid for its full-term.
While there is growing pressure to put responsibility for the current power crisis on the Siemens, sources in the KESC wonder that why the management is not proceeding against that German firm for causing the losses resulting from gross negligence or grossly negligent omissions under clause 9.1 of the agreement.
The agreement says that the KESC is obliged to pay service fee to the Siemens, which includes a fixed fee payable on a quarterly basis in advance for every contract year while the variable fee is payable on a quarterly basis in arrears for every contract year.
According to Annexure-B, fixed fee for the first and second contract year is $9 million and $8 million, respectively. For the third contract year onwards, it would be $8 million plus the rate of inflation, to be determined by the Consumer Price Index, as announced by the Federal Bureau of Statistics.
The variable fee is based on 1.5 per cent of energy sales, as mentioned in the immediately preceding audited annual accounts of the company for the revenue generated from sale of energy.
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