LAHORE: Power deficit for common consumers shot up on Monday to almost 65 per cent, forcing the Ministry of Water and Power which now controls electricity distribution to resort to up to 16 hours of loadshedding even in urban areas.

According to an official of the Pakistan Electric Power Company, “it is a total panic situation.” He denied that the company had “anything to do with power management now”.

“It is the federal ministry that has taken the charge and the company is totally out of loop as far as power generation and distribution is concerned. The ministry controls it, and must be answerable to people about what is it doing to ensure power supply to common man,” he said.

The company, he said, had been asked not to reveal the figures that it used to share with the press on a daily basis.

By Monday afternoon, the power generation had dropped to a meagre 7,800MW against a total demand of over 14,500MW, leaving a straight deficit of 6,700MW, says a company insider.

If power exemptions, for VVIP connections and defence installations that take more than 2,000MW, are taken out of equation, the electricity shortage for common man gets close to 9,000MW (or 62.07 per cent) against the total peak demand of 14,500MW, he said. “It means that more than 60 per cent of the country did not have power for over 60 per cent of time in the last 24 hours.”

In this scenario, the power planners are left with no choice but to resort to loadshedding of four to five hours at a stretch on the urban feeders. For rural feeders, there is virtually no power, and most of them were without power for around 18 hours over the past 24 hours, he said.

A spokesman for the ministry, however, denied that it was directly controlling power generation and distribution and said “it was still Pepco and NTDC (both have the same managing director) that oversee it.”

Contesting the figures, he said deficit was 4,500MW, with generation around 9,000MW and demand 13,500MW. But he did concede that the figures did not include power exemptions, as “they were part of overall distribution plan”.