In a fourth meeting linked to the Cabinet Committee of Energy (CCOE) in last twenty days, the Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made it abundantly clear that he wants to see an end to power outages by the end of December this year. And he also mentioned that any official would be taken to task if found responsible for gaps in power supply.
The Prime Minister reiterated that no extension would be permitted for completion of critical transmission and generation projects beyond December. In order to avoid the wrath of the Prime Minister, his ministers and aides have urged to finish trial runs to check the sustainability of the distribution and transmission system before providing any new deadline.
According to sources, power outages will likely continue in some rural areas of the country due to low recovery and high losses. They also shared trial runs of providing uninterrupted electricity from 12 am-8am in the high recovery area of Lahore, Islamabad and Rawalpindi are being conducted nowadays.
The Prime Minister was informed due to improvement in hydel based generation, unscheduled power outages were not being conducted across the country and load shedding was below 5 hours now. He also lamented the lack of adequate planning on part of the relevant ministries and expressed his anger over the current schedule of load shedding, the sources said.
The Secretary for Water and Power Yousaf Naseem Khokhar provided a briefing to the Prime Minister in regards to the load management plan for the summers. He also shared that 866 megawatts of power generation had been brought back into the system and another 400 MW will be added to the system by mid of May next month.
The Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif also issued instructions for forming a dedicated team for hourly monitoring of the power supply situation and would be responsible for providing weekly updates and reports on the power transmission and distribution system. The Minister for Water and Power, Khawaja Asif informed the meeting that a plan was being constituted for power system constraints resolution and would be finished by December this year.
