Islamabad - The National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC) team of experts on Tuesday left for China to study the Beijing model of electricity being developed for smog to implement the same in the smog-hit areas in Pakistan.
The directions were passed in a special meeting chaired by the Federal Minister for Power Division Awais Leghari to assess the situation arising due to outages caused by the new weather conditions in some parts of the country. Officials from all distribution companies, NTDC, Gnecos, NPCC and Power Division attended the meeting. The minister directed that immediate measures like installation of anti-smog and anti-fog disc be taken at critical points to ensure uninterrupted power supply to the consumers as there is no shortage of generation in the country.
Leghari also directed that all CEOs of the Discos and NTDC to sit together and evolve a technically sound solution for the problem. He directed that the planning and proposals should be finalised within three to four weeks time.
The minister was informed that areas in Mepco, Lesco and Hesco region are being faced with unique smog for the first time. The smog contains dust, industrial emissions, carbon mono, ozone and nitrogen oxide which when mixes with moistures at the late hours of night and heated by the high voltage create flash and results in breakage of insulators.
The minister was informed that so far in last four days 82 points at 500/220Kv transmission lines of NTDC have experienced the same phenomenon resulting in tripping. The Discos level 132kv transmission lines are also faced with same kind of problems and their number is much higher.
The minister said that the country has already entered into an era of bridging the demand and supply gap after more than one and half decade as sufficient generation is available within the system to meet the demand. He noted that even this morning the system demand is 12,552MW, while we have 14,000MW available generation which clearly shows that there is no shortage of electricity in the country.
The present situation is unique as the system is faced with outages due to technical conditions triggered by weather. He expressed the resolve that like the government success in bridging the demand supply gape, it will also succeed in solving the emerging problems due to new weather conditions. An official of the ministry told the scribe that now the days of loadshedding are over as the country is facing outages.
The main reason for the outages was smog and disruption in gas supply due to the scheduled outage of LNG terminal, the official said. He said that within 10 to 15 days the situation will come to normal.