Islamabad, Jan. 23 (BNA): Pakistan’s electricity ministry said Pakistan’s national grid suffered a major collapse on Monday, leaving millions of people without power for the second time in three months, and highlighting the weakness of infrastructure in the heavily indebted country.
Electricity Minister Khorram Dastagir told Reuters that the outage was caused by a large increase in voltage in the south of the network, which affected the entire network.
He added that supplies had been partially restored from north to south, about six hours after factories, hospitals and schools declared power outages. The network will be fully operational by 10 p.m. (1700 GMT), Dastagir said, adding, “We are doing our best to achieve restoration before then.”
The last major outage in October also took hours to fix. A senior ministry official blamed the outage, and frequent power outages that afflict 220 million people in Pakistan, on its aging network, Reuters reported.
“There is a fundamental weakness in the system,” said the official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media. “Generators are too far from load centers and transmission lines are too long and inadequate.”
Like much of the national infrastructure, Pakistan’s grid badly needs an upgrade that the government, which has moved from one International Monetary Fund bailout to the next, says it can’t afford it.
Pakistan has enough installed electric capacity to meet demand, but it lacks the resources to operate its oil and gas-fired plants, and the sector is too heavily indebted to afford investment in infrastructure and power lines.
The power outage affected parts of the country, from the financial capital Karachi to the capital Islamabad, the eastern city of Lahore and Peshawar in the north. Trading on the stock exchange was not affected.
In Peshawar, a city of more than 2.3 million people, some residents said they had no access to drinking water because the pumps run on electricity. Telecom companies and several hospitals said they had turned on their back-up generators.
“My children and I could not take a shower this morning because there was no water due to the electricity crisis,” said Hassan Imran, a bank employee in Karachi. “They went to school, and I came to the office without taking a shower.”
Rial