ISLAMABAD, March 27: The Water and Power Development Authority has decided to undertake an extensive Rs4.1 billion three-year programme to cut power and energy losses in the country.

According to official sources, Wapda has submitted a new "distribution rehabilitation project" for approval to the Planning Commission. The primary objective of the project is to reduce system's technical losses, resulting from power failure in the distribution conductors and equipment including losses due to additional current flowing in the system on account of poor power factor of customer loads. Wapda's distribution and line losses are still over 24 per cent while KESC's such losses have been estimated at 40 per cent.

The Planning Commission was informed that the "distribution rehabilitation measures" would aim at energy loss reduction, improvement in quality of power supply, improvement in reliability, improvement in safety, transmission and distribution capacity, improve customer service and reduce complaints, reduce cost of operation and maintenance and improve length of life of equipment.

Wapda informed the federal government authorities that a three-year programme would provide adequate distribution facilities in the system to fulfil the targets fixed in the industrial, agricultural and social sectors of the economy. This can be achieved by increasing transmission and distribution capability and that the considerable additional power can be released by rehabilitating the existing power state of the distribution system. The release of capacity will decrease in feeding the distribution system technical losses.

The secondary objectives of the programme is the reduction of administrative energy losses (pilferage of electricity), introduction of sound planning and engineering techniques for technical energy loss reduction, development of necessary data base for distribution of load forecasting, analysis, planning and engineering, improve operation and maintenance of the distribution system and improve customer service function.

The reduction in losses will release additional power to the distribution system. Simultaneously the different rehabilitation measures will contribute in improving the distribution system supply voltage, continuity of supply, system stability reliability and safety, which are the mandatory responsible of the power utility.

In order to identify the potential of technical losses, which yield the best return on capital investment, it is necessary to prepare a database of technical losses, occurring on all feeders.