Summer is back and we are going to face the horrors of energy crisis in Pakistan. We will face load shedding and hours and hours of electricity break down. We can only hope that this issue gets resolved this time, but it seems quite impossible.

      Today lets have a look on some points which will help us understand the power deficit problem of Pakistan. In Pakistan most of the electricity is generated by hydal power through dams. In summer the water comes by the melting of glaciors to the dams and they then produce electric power, but it is quite insufficient to overcome the needs of the large population. So relying only on the hydal power is quite impossible. Therefore we have power plants in Pakistan which use fossil fuel to generate electricity. The oil is bought from the international market in dollars. But as a matter of fact we don’t hay sufficient foreign exchange reservoirs to buy the oil on continual basis. When the government runs out of money and is unable to clear the outstanding bills of the oil companies they cut down the oil supply to minimal and sometimes even block it. This when the power plants running on oil reduce and seize their power output. As a result we experience an increase in load shedding. When the government pays the oil bills we get relief for a few days and then again the same situation arrives and we suffer. This cycles repeats again and again. Another major cause of load shedding in Pakistan is the lack of management and line losses. In summer sometimes the load shedding is done to prevent damage to the high power lines and transformers as they get heated up in the day time due to the scratching heat of sun.

    In order to reduce load shedding government should take serious measures by increasing the number of dams and increasing its exports for gaining more and more foreign exchange.