The Ministry of Water and Power hereby provides the update on the current situation of electricity load management in the country.
The unprecedented fall in the reservoir levels at Tarbella and Mangla has severely reduced electricity generation from hydel resources. In the month of March last year, the hydel generation had averaged at around 2560 MWs. During the last days of March 2017, it had declined to as low as 1620 MWs on 27th of March and to 1410 MWs on 28th of March. The increase in temperatures throughout the country and the sudden surge in demand created a deficit which could not be met by the reduced load shedding of 3 hours Urban and 4 hours Rural (with zero loadshedding for industries and higher loadshedding on low recovery/high theft feeders).
This resulted in unscheduled loadshedding on 27th and 28th March causing inconvenience to the consumers. Since it will take a few days for the dams to fill up and hydel generation to increase, it has been decided to increase the schedule of loadshedding for urban and rural feeders, by one and two hours respectively. Hence the new schedule will be 4 hours Urban and 6 hours Rural. This will reduce the loadshedding hours as compared to last year by two hours (which was 6 hours Urban and 8 hours Rural) but will be slightly higher than the previous five months of reduced loadshedding.
The above decision has stabilized the power flows and reduced the chances of unscheduled or higher loadshedding in most of the areas except low recoveries and high theft areas.
It is expected that the situation will improve during the month of April with increased river flows and there will be room to further reduce the loadshedding in the coming months.
It is also clarified all the IPPs and GENCO thermal plants are generating to their full capacity as per dispatch by National Power Control Center. These include: KAPCO, HUBCO, Kohinoor, Lalpir, Pakgen, Saba, Liberty, Uch, Fauji Kabirwala, Habibullah, Altern, Chashma 2 & 3, Atlas, Nishat Power, Nishat Chunian, Liberty Tech, Orient, Saif, Sapphire, Enrgo, Foundation, Fatima and all wind, solar, small hydel and bagasse plants. On the government generation plants, Jamshoro, Kotri, Guddu, MuzaffarGarh, Faisalabad, Nandipur (partly) are operating. Nandipur is being readied for conversion to gas and will be available in full capacity to grid by end-April. Guddu complex is generating 900 MWs against the capacity enhanced recently to 1500 MWs and will achieve this capacity in May when an additional gas pipeline will be completed to bring required gas for the enhanced supplies.
Apart from these, the plants which are under scheduled or forced outage, include: Rouch, Uch II, Chashma Nuclear-1 and one unit of Jamshoro and MuzaffarGarh each. It is expected that these will to be back into generation during the month of April, after the required maintenance.
It is, therefore, wrong to presume that any of the plant has gone out of generation due to any payment issues. All the plants have sufficient fuel stocks to run comfortably in the coming summer days.
The Ministry regrets the inconvenience caused to the consumers.
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