Energy security for Pakistan achieved: Officials
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ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has travelled a long distance in the last four years for achieving energy security as the present government has overcome electricity shortages and the country’s industrial sector is getting uninterrupted power supply for two years now.
According to a government source related to energy sector, the present federal government has been actively working on various energy projects including renewable energy since 2013 and has succeeded in adding 10,000 megawatts to the national grid that will solve the problem of electricity load shedding by end of this year.
The current government inherited a chronic power load shedding with yawning supply demand gap of over 6000 megawatts. Such an enormous gap caused load-shedding of 12-16 hours across the country a few years back.
The widespread and growing phenomenon of power load shedding led to significant losses of economic output and severely affected job creation and exports.
The situation has changed now as the average electricity production increased from 11,804 megawatts in June 2013 to 18,658MW in June 2017, which brought average shortfall down from 7,938MW to 2,888MW. Now, this shortfall is expected to be bridged next month.
The official says Pakistan would have surplus electricity from November 2017 with the start of power generation from new plants including liquefied natural gas-based plants and fall in demand due to winter.
The electricity consumption in industrial sector has increased by 13.14% during the last two years. At the same time, the share of industrial sector consumption has reached the highest ever level of 29.02%.
In 2013-14, the transmission and distribution losses were 18.6 percent, which were reduced to 17.2 percent in the year 2016-17.
Many areas in the country presently are getting uninterrupted power supply.State-owned National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC) has also improved performance of hundreds of grid stations and transmission lines.
Work on improving the transmission system is going on in all parts of the country, which is closely monitored by the Ministry of Water and Power. The system augmentation work for carrying the additional capacity will be completed by the end of 2017, which will make the country’s 90 % transmission system constraint-free, a ministry's monitoring report revealed.
The fulfillment of goal of uninterrupted power supply to Pakistani domestic and industrial consumers will create more job opportunities, boost business activities and lead to more robust exports.As part of its long term plans, the government is working to include production of more than 30,000 megawatts of electricity by 2022.
