ISLAMABAD: The national electricity grid on Thursday appeared to be heading for another crisis — the second one this month — after snags curtailed supply of natural gas and forced power plants generating a total of 3,000MW to shut down.

This has come at a time when a majority of the furnace oil-based power plants do not have the fuel required to immediately start producing electricity. On Oct 27 the prime minister had directed the officials concerned to increase the consumption of imported Liquefied Natural Gas.

A senior official told Dawn that the power companies had been given a notice of less than 12 hours to curtail gas supply and they were struggling to cope with an emergency-like situation.

“It is really a Herculean task to ramp up fuel supply in a short span of 12-13 hours and even more difficult to maintain the frequency in transmission lines and grid stations for smooth supply of electricity,” he said.

He said that all the major natural gas-based plants, including Balloki, Bhikki, Haveli Bahadur Shah, Nandipur and Fauji Kabirwala, and plants under the Northern Power Company would “move out of the system on Nov 24 [today] and are unlikely to be back in the system by Nov 27”.

“It would be unfortunate if the electricity consumers suffer beca­use of the erratic decision-making of the government, particularly when surplus capacity is available in the system,” said an official who dealt with demand and supply issues.

He said that against a total capacity of more than 25,000MW, the current demand stood at only 10,000-11,000MW.

In the notices about suspension of gas supply sent to the Northern Thermal Power, Muzaffargarh; Quaid-i-Azam Thermal Power, Lahore; National Power Parks Management, Lahore; Rousch Power, Lahore; and Fauji Kabirwala, Rawalpindi; the Sui Northern Gas Company Limited (SNGPL) said that as a result of a reduction in swap RLNG supply and increase in city loads, it was facing “severe depletion of system pack and system is being operated on lowest critical level”.

The official said the authorities were trying to reach out to the oil companies and refineries and struggling to line up oil tankers. He said that all this only revealed poor management and planning, as fuels were being switched erratically without proper supply chain arrangements.

The power system had suffered a major breakdown on Nov 3 due to maintenance issues at the LNG import terminal that affected key parts of Punjab and Balochistan following the government decision to close down furnace oil- and diesel-based power plants. Power shortfalls were experienced almost on a national level on Nov 3-7.

The power ministry had attributed that crisis to three important factors — smog, closure of plants and reduction in gas supplies. It had said at the time that it was struggling to stabilise the system because 4,200MW capacity or one-third of the 14,000-15,000MW demand was unavailable.

This time again one-third capacity, or 3,000MW, is unavailable when demand stands at 10,000-11,000MW.

Published in Dawn, November 24th, 2017