LAHORE: The fourth and last unit of the Neelum-Jhelum Hydropower Project (NJHP) was synchronised with national grid on Monday after it started generating over 200 megawatts on a trial basis.

During the project’s trial run, the unit will be tested on various loads ranging up to 242MW.

“With successful commissioning of its all four units, the NJHP is expected to attain its installed generation capacity of 969MW in a couple of days,” said a spokesperson for the Water and Power Development Authority.

Three units at the project have already been generating 726MW of electricity on trial basis; thus far, they have contributed around 900 million electricity units to the national grid.

It may be recalled that commercial operation of fourth unit at NJHP was delayed in May after experts identified some technical issues in the machine during various tests and sought replacement for some parts.

This unit had actually started trial generation in April and later went through various tests required for commercial operation. The unit injected more than 1.3m units of electricity during test run.

However, while testing the unit, the ‘run-outs’ exceeded specifications. Therefore, project consultants concluded that in order to smoothly operate the unit for its designated life, its parts — ‘labyrinth’ and ‘lower sleeve’ — should be replaced with new ones.

Published in Dawn, August 14th, 2018