Pakistan woke up this Monday plunged into darkness, after a major power outage caused a massive blackout in much of the countryincluding its capital and several of its main urban centers.
“Due to some frequency variations and voltage fluctuations in the south of the country in Sindh, the power generating units started to shut down one by one“said the spokesman for the Ministry of Energy, Sohail Atiq, to the media agency ‘EFE’.
“Restoration of grid stations in Peshawar and Islamabad has started via the Tarbela and Warsak dams and we expect power to be fully restored across the country within the next 12 hours“, explained the official.
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Among the cities affected are Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta.in addition to dozens of districts in its vicinity, as reported on Twitter throughout the morning by the different electricity companies responsible for each town.
This crisis gives the final blow to an energy crisis that had been evident in the rise in service prices. According to the ‘Bloomberg’ media agency, one of the factors that brought the situation of this Asian nation to the extreme was the world energy crisis of 2022: the very high prices forced Pakistan to drastically reduce imports of liquefied natural gas and this caused blackouts like the current one.
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Thus, Islamabad’s main electricity supplier, IESCO, reported a failure in the supply of more than a hundred stations in the capital, while the spokesman for K-Electric, in charge of Karachi, reported similar errors in what is the most populated city in the country.
Pakistan is in the throes of an agonizing economic crisis that led the government to recently approve a new energy conservation plan to reduce consumption, and which includes measures such as the early closure of markets and shopping centers, or the limitation on the purchase of certain products with low energy efficiency.
To increase these savings, the authorities turn off the power generation units at night in winter, the Energy Minister, Khurram Dastgir, told the Pakistani media outlet ‘GeoTV’ on Monday.
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Some experts estimate that this country of 220 million inhabitants consumes around 29,000 MW of energy at its peak in summer and around 12,000 MW at peak demand in winter.
Pakistan has suffered several similar massive blackouts in recent years, the largest being in May 2018, when a technical problem caused several power plants to go offline, affecting some 130 million people.
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*With information from EFE
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