ISLAMABAD: The government has decided to complete Shikarpur and Guddu grid stations and Uch-II transmission line during the current financial year to avoid countywide power breakdowns.

A senior official told Dawn that detailed inquiries into the national power breakdown late last month revealed that in addition to absence of a number of safety measures, delay in construction of the Shikarpur grid station and up-gradation of Guddu grid station coupled with non-existence of 125-km Uch-II transmission line remained major system weaknesses.

He said after one of the four major blackouts over the past two months the entire management of Guddu power station, including its chief executive, was suspended while another breakdown led to suspension of the managing director of the National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) and the chief of the National Power Control Centre.

The official said that after a detailed “system disturbance analysis” a three-pronged plan of action had been prepared on Feb 6.

The plan includes fast-track completion of the Shikarpur grid station for which contractors had been asked to streamline the issues, while the government would resolve financial issues for opening the letter of credit for import of some critical equipment.

The project was significantly behind the schedule, he said.

Secondly, the upgradation of the Guddu grid station would also be completed before the end of this year and the NTDC had been asked to work out financial requirements to arrange funding by the federal government.

Thirdly, the crucial Uch-II transmission line of about 125km from the project site to Sibbi would be completed by 2016 and meetings had been held with contractors to resolve various issues. This line should have been completed in April last year before the commercial operations of the Uch-II power project which the prime minister had inaugurated to demonstrate government’s determination to ease energy crisis, despite repeated warnings from experts.

It was noted that the government will either have to keep one of the two Uch projects closed and pay capacity charges or face repeated outages because the transmission system was simply incapable of evacuating more than 900MW of the two plants.

The official said that the ministry of water and NTDC had been directed to settle disputes with international lending agencies for fast-track implementation of system augmentation projects.

In the short term, major reasons for power failures were the absence of an effective mechanism to control the problem of under frequency on 291 feeders.

However, about 10 feeders in Lahore area, one in Hyderabad and 16 in the Peshawar Electric Supply Company, which were still under frequency, needed to be protected.

Published in Dawn February 13th , 2015

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