ISLAMABAD: The governments promise of ending power outages seems farce as reduction in gas supply caused power plants generating 3,000MW of electricity to go offline.
At end of October, Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi had ordered the closure of furnace oil-based power plants and directed to raise usage of imported Liquefied Natural Gas for power generation instead.
Power companies were issued a notice and given less than twelve hours to reduce gas supply, reported Dawn.
An official decried it was very difficult to increase fuel supply within a time span of 12-14 hours and preserving frequency in transmission lines and grid stations for electricity supply was hard to maintain.
Balloki, Bhikki, Haveli Bahadur Shah, Nandipur and Fauji Kabirwala, using gas to produce electricity will go offline from November 24th and aren’t expected to be online till 27th, said the official.
In a notification sent to Quaid-i-Azam Thermal Power, Lahore, National Power Parks Management, Lahore, Northern Thermal Power, Muzaffargarh and other companies, which said due to decrease in swap RLNG supplies and rising in power loads of cities, power grid was operating at the lowest critical level.
He added an SOS call had been issued to refineries and oil companies for lining up oil tankers, which was a challenge considering the unprecedented situation.
