LAHORE: The Lahore Electric Supply Company (Lesco) has started operating the state of the art Power Distribution Control Centre (PDCC) after US Consul General Nina Maria Fite inaugurated it here on Thursday.

Installed with technical and funding assistance of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the PDCC is part of the agency’s load data improvement project launched to support Pakistan’s energy sector.

With PDCC becoming operational, Lesco can now, like the country’s regional control centre in Islamabad, monitor its allocated share of electricity consumption in megawatts (MWs), besides its grids and feeder-wise electricity usage, load, loadshedding, switching feeder-to-feeder load to minimise unscheduled loadshedding and take other appropriate actions to deal with various issues.

The centre will also enable Lesco to monitor the flow of power through their grid stations. The new meters will verify actual power flow and help reduce unplanned loadshedding.

“The centre will provide real-time access to electricity load data to managers of national grid and help Lesco overcome unscheduled loadshedding,” said Ms Fite while speaking at the inaugural ceremony held here at Lesco headquarters.

“The US government and the American people are committed to assisting the Government of Pakistan to improve the power distribution system throughout the country. We partner with power distribution companies to improve their operations, reduce losses and ultimately make sure that the Pakistani people have a more reliable power supply,” she said.

The US consul general said the unplanned loadshedding was one of the leading challenges in the country’s power sector, costing Pakistan an estimated two per cent of its GDP and 400,000 jobs in 2012.

“Loadshedding is a consequence of the imbalance between electricity generation and demand and only increased generation will completely eliminate loadshedding. Unscheduled loadshedding, however, is the result of lack of real-time energy consumption data and can be reduced by improved monitoring systems, such as the USAID project inaugurated at Lesco,” she explained.

She said the USAID’s five-year Power Distribution Programme seeks to work jointly with the government-owned DISCOs in Pakistan to improve their performance, reducing losses and improving revenues and customer services. Through this programme and many others, the US assisted Pakistan’s efforts to reform its power sector and end the current energy shortfall, she added.

On the occasion, Lesco chief Arshad Rafiq said the USAID’s intervention through getting the centre established and operated first in Lahore had recognised the company’s major role of covering a huge population.

“Since the power distribution and revenue generation by Lesco is one-fourth of the total power distribution and revenue in Pakistan, the new system will enable us to monitor, control and distribute the quota of megawatts we are receiving from the national grid,” he said, adding that prior to the centre’s establishment, Lesco was dependent on RCC for all the information.

Talking to Dawn, Ghazanfar Ahmad, a sub-station operator at the PDCC, said with the help of the state-of-the-art system the officials could monitor the entire electricity supply and demand in terms of industrial usage, usage by residential societies, tube-wells, cold storages, factories, hospitals, big shopping malls/offices and government institutions etc.

Arshad Rafique told this reporter that since Thursday was the first day of the PDCC operation, Lesco for the first time had the opportunity to monitor the data regarding its allocated power quota, usage and load management.

“You can see the supply of electricity on the monitor is 1,796MWs to 1,804MWs against our total consumption of 2,300MWs. But we reduced the loadshedding for couple of hours on Thursday because of the low consumption or demand of 1,790MWs against a supply of 1,796 to 1,804MWs. This all happened due to the new system we have now,” he added.