Pakistan begins restoring power after countrywide blackout

Pakistan’s government began restoring power to millions of people yesterday after a breakdown in the grid triggered the worst electricity outage in months and highlighted the weak infrastructure of the heavily indebted nation.
An inquiry has been launched into the outage, which began at around 7am local time and has so far lasted more than 12 hours during the peak winter season.
As evening drew on and homes were without electricity in the dark, Energy Minister Khurram Dastgir wrote on Twitter that authorities had started restoring power across the country. Dastgir had told reporters earlier: “We have faced some hurdles but we will overcome these hurdles, and will restore the power.”
The outage, which the minister had said was due to a voltage surge, is the second major grid failure in three months, and adds to the blackouts that Pakistan’s nearly 220mn people suffer on an almost-daily basis.
Power was beginning to return in parts of the capital Islamabad and the southwest province of Balochistan, said Dastgir.
Pakistan’s largest city and economic hub Karachi is likely to see electricity restored in the next three to four hours, a spokesperson for K-Electric Ltd, the southern city’s power provider, said.
Analysts and officials blame the power problems on an ageing electricity network, which like much of the national infrastructure, desperately needs an upgrade that the government says it can ill afford.
The International Monetary Fund has bailed out Pakistan five times in the last two decades. Its latest bailout tranche, however, is stuck due to differences with the government over a programme review that should have been completed in November.
Pakistan has enough installed power capacity to meet demand, but it lacks resources to run its oil-and-gas powered plants. The sector is so heavily in debt that it cannot afford to invest in infrastructure and power lines. China has invested in its power sector as part of a $60bn infrastructure scheme that feeds into Beijing’s “Belt and Road” initiative.
“We have been adding capacity, but we have been doing so without improving transmission infrastructure,” said Fahad Rauf, head of research at Karachi brokerage Ismail Iqbal Industries.
The outage occurred on a winter’s day where temperatures are forecast to fall to around 4 degrees Celsius (39°F) in Islamabad and 8 degrees Celsius (46°F) in Karachi.
Many people also have no running water due to a lack of power for the pumps.
Earlier, Dastgir told Reuters the grid should be fully functioning by 10pm.
The outage hit Internet and mobile phone services. Several companies and hospitals said they had switched to back-up generators, but disruptions continued across the board.
Thousands of mobile phone towers also went offline across Pakistan due to the power cut, an industry source told Reuters.
The disruption hit the country’s approximately 40,000 telecommunication towers.
The telecommunication industry source raised fears that if power was not switched back on soon, it could lead to a communications blackout as mobile phone towers run out of backup fuel and batteries.
He added that service degradation had begun in some parts of the country as some towers went offline.
Some social media users in Pakistan complained of mobile signals disappearing in major cities of the country, including Islamabad. “No signals at the Karakoram apartments, Diplomatic Enclave, Islamabad,” former Senator Sehar Kamran said on Twitter.
Separately, the country’s telecommunication regulator, the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), warned of outages.
“Due to country wide power outage, users may face service disruptions,” PTA said in a statement.
It said operators have been instructed to inform subscribers and to do their utmost to refuel backup power on the maximum number of mobile tower sites.
A spokesperson for PTA did not respond to a question on how many of Pakistan’s telecommunication towers were offline.
Global Internet monitoring group Netblocks said on Twitter that metrics showed telecommunications in most regions of the country had been impacted by the country-wide power outage and that there had been a significant decline in Internet access.
Pakistan has 194mn cellular subscribers and 124mn broadband subscribers, according to PTA.