THE country has been left bone dry and the countrymen are hungry for electricity to keep themselves cool due to an alarming drop in rainfall and prevailing of a heat wave across the country. The sultry weather is taking a toll on the power supply, although the government is talking loud about its unprecedented success in generating power over the past few years but ‘makeshift’ power plants are not generating the necessary power. The New Nation reported that as the weather is becoming hotter, people across the country on Tuesday suffered from five to six times for several hours load-shedding in a single day due to production loss of power generating units. Most power plants are generating low power compared to their capacity due to shortage of fuel — oil and gas, and technical glitches. The government has supported the mushrooming of rental power plants in recent years but the rental power plants have generated minimal power against the stipulated capacity and siphoned off revenue from the national exchequer.
The distribution companies are enforcing 1477MW load-shedding on an average per day in the wake of a production shortfall. Though the country’s installed power generation capacity is at 14,077MW as of April 3 last, the maximum power generation recorded for any single day is 8,348MW — also incidentally recorded on the same day. Due to acute power crisis, industrial production is facing a serious setback, and garment factories are losing working hours. Moreover, the high temperature, poor rainfall and disruption in irrigation due to power shortage are taking a toll on agriculture with almost a drought-like situation in many areas. And another 1160MW of electricity generation remained disrupted due to short supply of gas in gas-fired power plants.
The situation may further worsen at any time as seven more power plants with 610MW capacity may be shut down for shortage of diesel and furnace oil. As power consumption is increasing due to ongoing heat wave, its demand has crossed 8500MW in the recent days against mean power generation of 7500MW. Load-shedding for more than half a day is a common phenomenon outside the cities while the rural areas get power supply for a very limited time in a day. Frequent power outages caused disruptions in water supply by WASA in the capital and other cities.
The government should immediately address the crisis on urgency basis and ensure sustainable power generation by modernizing the old eco-friendly power plants and rethink about its over dependence on rental power plants. The government’s vague propagation over power generation would never solve the crisis unless taking effective, competitive and comprehensive power generating policy.
