LAHORE: The impact of the power breakdown originated at the switchyard leading to tripping the Guddu Thermal Power Plant couldn’t be ended on Monday, as the forced loadshedding continued for hours in Lahore and various cities and rural areas for the last couple of days.

“The issue still persists, as the Lahore Electric Supply Company’s total demand of 2,500MW has been reduced to 1,800MW, forcing us to observe forced loadshedding on hourly basis in several parts of Lesco service areas, including Lahore, Punjab’s biggest load centre,” a senior official told Dawn. “And for how long this issue persists exactly, we are unaware. But we have learnt that it will take a couple of days to normalise the situation,” he added.

According to an official source in the power division, the National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC) engineers have completed their work to rectify the fault emerged at the switchyard that led to tripping of the Guddu plant and the transmission lines connected with it directly or indirectly.

“The NTDC engineers have replaced the circuit breaker that caused the issue. And after fixing the fault, the switchyard is now operational,” the official maintained. “But, now, the plant will take time to start and generate power at its full capacity. At present, its only one turbine of 125MW has become operational, followed by others to be made operational soon one by one,” he said.

Situation likely to normalise in a couple of days

He said another issue is the dense fog which is causing problems in smooth evacuation and transmission of the electricity generation from Guddu plant. And one more issue is the hydel power generation that has significantly dropped due to canal closures for desilting.

On the other hand, the people continue to suffer, as the load shedding has forced them to face a great deal of inconvenience. “Due to loadshedding, we are not even able to operate our geysers run by electricity due to non-availability of gas,” said Ikram, a resident of Kotli Pir Abdul Rehman. “It has also made us unable to iron the clothes,” he added.

Imdad, a resident of Gulshan-i-Ravi, said his locality is experiencing worst-ever loadshedding these days. “Owing to absence of light, our streetlights are not operational, leading to street crimes,” he said, adding that loadshedding coupled with voltage fluctuation is also damaging the home appliances.Meanwhile, long suspension of power was experienced in many towns and cities of Sukkur, Ghotki, Shikarpur, Jacobabad Larkana and Dadu circles due to dense fog which affected SEPCO system.

Power supply was suspended from 49 grid stations of 132 and 66 kV to many towns and cities as the 422 feeders of SEPCO were tripped due to heavy fog.

(Waseem Shamsi from Sukkur also contributed to this report)

Published in Dawn, January 2nd, 2024