A countrywide power breakdown, triggered by a “frequency variation” in the national grid early Monday morning, has left large parts of the country, including Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar, and Quetta, without electricity.
The extreme shortfall in electricity generation is said to be the major cause of the power breakdown that hit various parts of the country.
This morning, power generation was less than 7,000 megawatts, according to reliable sources. There were up to 6,000 megawatts.
Hydel power generation in the country goes down to 90 percent, while thermal power generation goes down by 70 percent, according to sources.
According to sources, over 12 power plants have already been shut down due to various technical faults. Guddu, Jamshoro, and Muzaffargarh power plants were not running. The Neelum-Jhelum power project, with a capacity of 969 megawatts, has been shut down for the last eight months owing to technical problems, sources said.
Power Minister Khurrum Dastagir, while talking to Geo News, said that the power generation units are temporarily shut down in the winter at night as an economic measure to save fuel costs.
The systems were turned on at 7:30 a.m. this morning, one by one, frequency variation was reported in the southern part of the country between Jamshoro and Dadu. There was a fluctuation in voltage, and power generating units were shut down one by one due to cascading impacts. “This is not a major crisis,” said the federal minister as the country plunged into darkness for the second time in four months.
