Federal Minister for Energy – Hammad Azhar has refuted claims of power outages in the country stating that no loadshedding was reported in any part of the country in the past 12 hours.
Hammad Azhar on Friday (today), took to social media to announce that the country has reported ‘zero’ loadshedding in the past 12 hours.
The federal minister highlighted that 1,500 megawatts of electricity was added into the system in the past two days and more will be added on Friday (today).
KE is being provided an extra 350-500 megawatts of electricity, whereas another 1,000 megawatts of electricity will be added to the system by Saturday (tomorrow), he added.
Furthermore, the energy minister apprised that there has been a 15-20% increase in electricity demand in peak hours as compared to 2020 last year.
It is to be noted that Pakistan’s electricity shortfalls exceeded 6,500 megawatts on Thursday a day earlier, resulting in prolonged power outages across the country.
The current electricity shortfall is a result of reduction of RLNG to power plants. The situation has further been exacerbated by a fall in hydropower production which stands at around 3,300 MW as Tarbela Dam’s turbines are nonoperational for the past six days for maintenance purposes.
In Peshawar, people are facing loadshedding for around 6 to 8 hours, South Punjab – 8 to 12 hours, rural Sindh – 4 to 14 hours, Balochistan – up to 22 hours and Lahore is facing 3 to 4 hours of power outages on a daily basis.
