Power outages in the country 

There has been a n unprecedented growth in, load because of an increase in the use of home appliances across the country by up to 10-20 percent. WAPDA officials claim that this is alarming. As many as 7.5 million home appliances got connected to the powers system of both WAPDA & KESC in 2005-2006. In 2006-2007 the figures have gone up to 9.8 million to 9.5 million across the country. This data has been culled from the Economic Survey of Pakistan and Federal Bureau of Statistics and from manufactures and associations dealing in the field. Following the shortage of power in the summer of 2006, the government in Islamabad, in consultation with energy experts and professionals, implemented an energy conservation plan, which eventually failed due to one or the other reasons.

Record breaking summer temperature might be blamed for global warming, but the frequent power outages as experienced by the people this time are again not the acts of God.

WAPDA insiders say that the ongoing wave of power load shedding would continue till 2009.

Reasons for the current crisis are great and number some of them are classified as below: 

1.  Poor power generation

2.  Fragile transmission & distribution network

3.  Steadily increasing demand

4.  Overloading

5.  Lack of political will to build more dams, etc.

Current power generation capacity of the system from all resources is 17,350 mega watt. This includes 6,108 MW from 16 IPs. This is high time that the government should wake up and  take special initiatives to control over loading and overcome continued power outage because this is our national issue.