POWER outages occur with frequency. These blackouts are primarily driven by changing priorities for spending on maintenance and reinforcement of the prevailing weak grid system.

The regulated vertically integrated power system structure (one utility handles all the functions of power generation, transmission and distribution within a certain geographical extent) is the reason that there is an inferior power system infrastructure in our country. Moreover, there are no reliability and security standards followed by our power utilities.

In order to mitigate the risk of cascading power outages in future, there should be some meaningful and effective penalties for non-compliance with standards and regulations.

Furthermore, a regulatory body like NEPRA should enforce through regulations that affected customers must be given monetary incentives (value of lost load) in their energy bill in case of longer interruptions due to outages. Models to evaluate the customer damage and value of lost load can be borrowed from existing literature.

This customer-oriented regulation will implicitly motivate the power distribution companies to make subsequent investments to improve their existing infrastructure security and reliability.

Mubbashir Ali

Espoo, Finland

Published in Dawn, November 24th, 2014