October 07, 2008	Tuesday	Shawwal 7, 1429

KARACHI, Oct 6: The Karachi Electric Supply Company on Monday failed to prevent load-shedding from happening which forced people to endure spells of outages stretching up to one and a half hour.

Sources said that the city was facing a power shortage of at least 300 megawatts primarily due to the tripping of unit no.4 of Bin Qasim Thermal Power Station which had previously been giving 80 megawatts.

Instead of giving the accumulative power output of at least 1160 megawatts, Bin Qasim has been persistently operating much below its capacity. Two of its units are especially being operated much below the optimum level to save on fuel cost.

However, KESC maintains that it is facing a shortage of around 200 megawatts, resulting in one spell of load-shedding in a day of at least one and a half hour. But till afternoon two such spells of power outage have been experienced by the consumers. And it is feared that load-shedding may continue till late into the night.

A KESC spokesman said that since mid-September a new corporate management had taken over the privatised power utility and efforts were being made to curtail the duration of load-shedding to minimum ie one and a half hour.

The spokesman said that if at any place a power outage extended well beyond more than one and a half hour, it should be considered a result of some technical fault in the power transmission and distribution systems.