Power gradually returns a day after massive outage
ISLAMABAD: The national power grid was restored in Pakistan, the energy minister said yesterday, a day after a nationwide breakdown left most of the country’s 220 million people without electricity and caused tens of millions of dollars in industry losses.
The outage started around 7.30am on Monday, a failure linked to a costcutting measure as Pakistan grapples with an economic crisis.
Energy Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan said the grid was repaired around 5.15am but load-shedding would continue over the next two days as coal and nuclear plants were brought back online.
“Industry will be exempt from this load-shedding,” he told reporters in Islamabad.
Electricity returned to urban centres overnight, including the mega cities of Karachi and Lahore.
Secretary general of the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association Shahid Sattar estimated losses of $70 million (2.3 billion baht) to the sector, Pakistan’s largest exporter and crucial booster of foreign exchange reserves.
Around 90% of factories shut down on Monday with gas supplies too “patchy” to stand in, he said.
“Each time there is a power cut the mill has to be restarted from scratch, which takes up a lot of time and resources,” he told AFP.
“We can’t pick up from where we stopped. All that thread that’s in the middle of being dyed and treated, et cetera, cannot be used again. So we face massive losses that way.”
The economy is already hobbled by rampant inflation, a falling rupee and severely low foreign exchange reserves, with the power cut piling extra pressure on small businesses.
Pakistan’s power system is complex and precarious, and problems can quickly cascade.
Mr Khan earlier said a variation in frequency on the national grid caused the cut, as power generation units were turned on early on Monday morning.
The units are temporarily switched off on winter nights to save fuel, he had told reporters.
Localised power cuts and load-shedding are daily occurrences in Pakistan, and hospitals, factories and government institutions are often kept running by private generators. But the machines are beyond the means of most citizens and small businesses.
In Karachi, hundreds of water pumps were also offline during the power cut, heaping more problems on Pakistan’s largest city of more than 15 million people.
In Rawalpindi, homeware trader Muhammad Iftikhar Sheikh, 71, said he was unable to demonstrate electronic products to browsing patrons.
Schools mostly continued either in the dark or using battery-powered lighting.
Unreliable power is “a permanent curse which our governments have failed to overcome”, he said.
Mobile phone services were also disrupted as a result of the outage, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority tweeted.