Pakistan has been dealing with sweeping large-scale outages in power since this past Monday morning, spotlighting a large number of issues that the electrical grid of the country has now got to deal with.
Multiple millions of people all over the country were forced to go without power as a massive blackout struck at 7:34 in the morning local time. Officials stated that the power is now back on in the areas surrounding Islamabad, along with another nearby city, Rawalpindi, in the wake of an eight-hour lapse, as reported by a piece from The New York Post.
As stated in the report coming from Dawn, a Pakistani news outlet, the vast majority of the 220 million people who made their residence in the country were heavily impacted.
The blackout kicked off within the Sindh Province due to a massive power spike in voltage, according to local authorities. Khurram Dastgir Khan, the minister of energy explained in a press conference that the issue with the voltage caused an almost domino effect wave of electricity plants quickly failing all over Pakistan.
Dastgir had also reportedly claimed that the situation was “not a major crisis,” but quite a few businesses and residences were bereft of power for a period of 12 hours after the outage kicked off.
He explained to Geo TV that some of the power was kicking off throughout the night because of the winter season, as reported by the BBC.
“In winter, the demand for electricity reduces nationwide, hence, as an economic measure, we temporarily close down our power generation systems at night,” he stated.
Despite this, once the systems were reset and turned back on, “frequency variation and voltage fluctuation” were spotted in the southern area of the country “somewhere between Dadu and Jamshoro” and then “power generating units shut down one by one,” he expressed.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also explained that a high-level group would be set up to investigate the situation around the massive blackout.
Even though a number of areas started to see electricity trickle back on, explained Dastgir, experts have stated that the issues regarding electricity stem from the fact that the country’s electrical grid is very old. The government, however, reportedly made the claim that it currently does not have the money to try and improve it.
Back in 2020, Prime Minister Imran Khan claimed that 60% of the electricity for the country would be made from sources of renewable energy by 2030.
