ISLAMABAD: In bid to reduce loadshedding, the Ministry of Water and Power has directed the Power Distribution Companies (DISCOs) and the National Power Control Centre (NPCC) to efficiently manage the increase in demand and supply gap of electricity, which is being created due to very low hyel power generation.
Sources said that the power outages are increasing to several reasons and restrained capacity to generate power is also a major factor. They said that the biggest single factor was the low indent of water from the provinces which did not require much irrigation water after heavy rains during the past more than a month. The lack of water discharge from both Tarbela and Mangla led to drop of hydel generation between 800-1200 MW during the past one week, out of the total hydel capacity of 7100 MW, they said adding that another big contributor was the failure of two units of 300 MWs each in Hubco plant which created a large generation vacuum.
Sources said that after the situation was controlled through forced loadshedding and it has now been limited to an extra one hour in addition to the scheduled loadshedding of 7 hours in average in Urban areas and 9 hours on average in Rural areas. The industrial feeders will remain at 8 hours load shedding as per schedule for summers. The industry after several years, remained on zero load shedding for four months out of the past six months.
