Pakistan's power crisis mars start of election year

By Nick Allen Jan 9, 2007, 16:36 GMT

Islamabad - A week-long imposition of energy blackouts to combat Pakistan's acute power crisis was hardly the bright start hoped for by President Pervez Musharraf in what is expected to be a key election year for his government.

The unpopular 'loadshedding' cuts across the country of the previous days would not be extended, the Ministry of Water and Power said Tuesday in a statement after a meeting of energy chiefs in Islamabad.

But the inconvenience after many promises of improved conditions can only nonplus the population of more than 160 million people as it prepares to elect a new parliament later this year or in early 2008.

The shortfall in electricity and gas supplies has steadily accumulated in recent years but its causes combined in late 2006 in a sharp reminder that the military leader's modernization programme is vulnerable to many problems affecting the country. And the power crisis is only expected to deepen in the coming years.

Struggling to meet a reported 18-per-cent supply deficit, electricity plants have been starved of natural gas by disruptions to essential gas production by the conflict against insurgents in Balochistan, increased domestic gas consumption in the harsh winter, and increased gasification of villages in the pre-election period.

Meanwhile, hydroelectric power supply has fallen due to a surfeit of rainwater in many areas that prevents the release of further water from dams.

As a result, Pakistan's Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA) introduced what were supposed to be cuts of only half an hour from January 4 to 9, with the brunt of the shortfall passed on to rural areas. Starting even before the official outages, parts of the country suffered up to three hours loss of supply, occurring at irregular times of day.

'These unannounced power cuts have become a nuisance for us,' said Zafar Iqbal, the owner of a wheat-grinding mill in the town of Taxila, 40 kilometres from capital Islamabad. 'Each time it takes more than an hour to restart the process after clearing up the machinery of leftover grains.

The disruptions not only undermine the president's pledges to deliver to the nation, including the electrification of 21,882 additional villages by the end of 2007, but also threaten a repeat of angry scenes last May in Pakistan's largest city Karachi. Crowds blocked main roads in protest against prolonged power cuts that left millions sweltering without fans and air conditioning.

A few days before that outcry, Musharraf was still adamant that there shall be light at the furthest corners of the country: 'By December 2007, each village having 10 houses will get electricity, and this is my promise to the nation,' he said during a visit to a dam project near Karachi.

The New Year's shortage is supposed to ease with the import of 50,000 tons of oil to power the furnaces and with improvemed weather conditions.

But the crisis is expected to grow in the next two years due to an almost 50 per cent increase in electricity demand and slow improvement to the supply. By 2010, the shortfall is predicted to exceed 5,000 MW, more than the current combined output of Pakistan's two largest hydroelectric power stations.

To tackle the problem in the long term, it has been decided to build five more major dams by 2016 at a reported cost of 20 to 25 billion US dollars.

More gas should also be available in four to five years once construction begins of the planned Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. Further relief should come from gasifying coal from the Thar coal field, a giant deposit located under the Cholistan desert in the central Punjab province. Wind power is also emerging as a likely alternative energy source for Pakistan.

An immediate conservation proposal to have an extra weekly holiday on Saturday (Pakistan currently works a six-day week) was rejected by the government. WAPDA, meanwhile, urged industrial units to stagger their rest day in order to lower demand on weekdays.

But the power authority has other headaches as it becomes increasingly reliant on foreign oil. According to management, it cannot make ends meet without imposing outages, increasing electricity tariffs or securing government subsidies of some 1.3 billion dollars to cover oil imports.

Pakistan's consumption of furnace oil last year reportedly rose by about 80 per cent to 18 million tons compared with 4.5 million tons in 2005, due in large part to higher electricity demand.