Mallika Dureja
Islamabad, Pakistan – Due to a technological glitch, much of Pakistan, including the nation’s capital of Islamabad, is currently without electricity. The energy ministry tweeted that the national grid’s system frequency dropped around 7:34am (02:34 GMT) on Monday. The work to maintain the system is moving along quickly, according to the tweet.
Khurram Dastgir Khan, the country’s electricity minister, recently told a local TV station that, in order to save money on fuel, the national grid momentarily turns off power generation units at night during the winter.
However, he noted that between Jamshoro and Dadu in the southern Sindh province, frequency fluctuation was detected this morning as the systems were turned on one by one at 7:30am. In a cascading effect, voltage fluctuations caused power plants to shut down one by one. “This is not a serious crisis,” he said.
While some power grids have been restored, Khan estimates that full restoration could take up to 12 hours. Later on Monday, during a news conference in Islamabad, the minister reported that authorities were working around the clock to resolve the problem, with electricity being restored in some areas but not all.
Around 85% of #Pakistan is out of electricity from last night..
Reason ! – The main transmission line of Chinese Hubco coal power plant owned by '#China in #Balochistan has been attacked & destroyed..!!#PakistanEconomicCrisis pic.twitter.com/cVlrPPyxt7
— Satya Swar ( सत्य स्वर) Digital (@Satya_Swara) January 23, 2023
“Thankfully, the distribution system has not been damaged, but we still need power to switch on the generation units, which can only be done one at a time,” he told reporters, adding that a three-person inquiry team had been formed to determine the reason of the blackout.
A 54-year-old man named Muhammed Pervez who lives in Pakistan’s largest city of Karachi stated earlier that his sick father had been waiting in line for more than an hour to see a doctor because the power outage had rendered the electronic systems at a private clinic inoperable.
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He told Al Jazeera that while larger facilities may have backup generators, smaller facilities often have to rely on manual processes for even the most basic services.
The power outage forced Kamran Arshad, managing director of a Lahore-based textile company, to close his plant on Monday. Given the current gas scarcity and the power outage, he announced that the factory would be closed for the day.
The interruption might cost billions, according to Arshad, a senior officer at the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association. To put that in perspective, “our personal loss for one day of non-production is more than 20 million Pakistani rupees” (about $87,000). He told Al Jazeera that the sector as a whole has likely lost billions of rupees owing to the malfunction.
The Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), a public hospital in Islamabad, had to turn off its operating theatres owing to a power outage, according to a hospital official.
The Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre (JPMC) in Karachi, Pakistan, is one of the major public hospitals in Pakistan. However, hospital officials have stated that the power loss will not disrupt operations. We have sufficient backup that will allow us to work for more than five days without interruption,” JPMC spokesman Jahangir Durrani said in an interview with Al Jazeera.
There are almost 220 million people in the country, and the power outage happened during a time of severe economic hardship.
https://twitter.com/ShirjeelRana/status/1617596348429406209
In an effort to conserve electricity during the current fuel crisis, the government issued a directive earlier this month requesting marketplaces and shopping centres to close by 8:30pm. But nobody paid attention to the plea for help.
A huge power outage has struck Pakistan for the second time in the past four months. In October, there was a blackout that lasted for over 12 hours and hit the south the worst.
