Pakistan woke up in darkness after a major power outage caused a massive blackout across much of the country, including the capital Islamabad and many of its major urban centres. This was announced by the Ministry of Energy itself, which reported “a huge grid failure in recent months”.
Factories, hospitals and schools across the country were left without electricity for hours after a voltage fluctuation occurred in the grid between the towns of Jamshoro and Dadu in the southern province of Sindh, Energy Minister Khurrum Dastagir said. “There was a voltage fluctuation and the systems were shut down one by one. This is not a major crisis,” Dastagir told news channel Geo TV.
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Outages have been reported in the southern port city of Karachi, the capital Islamabad, the eastern city of Lahore and Peshawar in the north. The plight of Pakistan’s energy sector is emblematic of an economy that has drifted from one International Monetary Fund bailout to another, with frequent power outages due to a lack of funds to upgrade outdated infrastructure.
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When the grid went out last October, it took several hours for power to be restored. In Peshawar, a city of more than 2.3 million people, some residents said they could not get clean water because the pumps were powered by electricity. Mohammad Asim, spokesman for the city’s Lady Reading Hospital, the largest in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said backup generators were being used to provide uninterrupted electricity to the emergency department, intensive care units and laboratories.
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The energy ministry released a statement saying work was underway to revive the system and the minister said electricity had been restored in parts of the country. Pakistan has enough grid to meet the demand, especially in winter when it mostly has a surplus. But the country lacks the resources to run its oil and gas plants, and the sector is so heavily in debt that it cannot afford to invest in infrastructure and power lines. “The generators are too far from the load centers and the transmission lines are too long and not enough,” a senior power official told Reuters whom he declined to be quoted because he was not authorized to speak to the media.
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“Restoration of grid stations in Peshawar and Islamabad has begun through Tarbela and Warsak dams and we expect full power restore across the country within the next 12 hours,” the spokesman said. Ministry of Energy, Sohail Atiq. Among the affected cities are Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta, as well as dozens of districts in their vicinity, as reported on Twitter throughout the morning by the different power companies responsible for each city.