MULTAN: The Multan Electric Power Company and USAID had jointly completed 18 development projects with a total cost of Rs7.3 billion for upgradation of the system.
The Mepco had significantly reduced its annual technical and commercial losses besides adding about Rs 6 billion to its annual revenue, Chief Executive Officer Engineer Fazallullah Durrani expressed these views while holding a press conference after completing the USAID power distribution programme here on Thursday.
About details of the USAID’s projects, he said power development programme established state-of-the art IT infrastructure and installed 40,000 smart automatic metre reading (AMR) metres for industrial, commercial customers and tube-wells of Multan, Khanewal and Vehari besides introducing a new billing system with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
He said it helped in delivering timely and accurate bills to customers, adding that hand held units (HHUs) were introduced for metre reading while exiting customer services centres had also been upgraded during last three years.
To overcome unscheduled loadsheding, he said they had installed a latest automatic monitoring and control system and also established a new power distribution control centre. It had also tremendously improved our load management and given relief to the masses.
About 48,000 capacitors had been installed on tube-wells which improved supply to customers and saved 70 megawatt besides energy of Rs two billion, he added. For the first time, single phase smart transformers had been introduced in congested areas of Multan and bare-conductor LT lines had been replaced by 600 KM aerial bundled cable (ABC) which has improved power supply and safety of the public in these areas and has reduced supply complaints.
The CEO thanked USAID for the assistance which has helped improve our performance considerably and hoped that USAID will consider the Mepco for more assistance in their next energy sector programme.
On this occasion, Chief Engineer Development Chaudhary Arshad, Director Customer services Rao Zia-u-Rehman, SE Multan circle Shahid Hameed and USAID representatives Saleem Arif, Naveed Anjum and others were also present.
