Govt telling lies to cover up power sector failures: opposition

While it’s apparently true that a human error at the Guddu Power Station triggered a power outage on Saturday night, the main reason for its effects to be felt across much of the country was poor maintenance and subsequent failure of the protection system in the national grid.

It became worse because there were no spinning reserves, top officials from the power sector were quoted as saying by a private source.

But Federal Minister for Energy Omar Ayub Khan says he is “on his toes” to find the cause of the major breakdown and will make it public once he finds out.

He had said transmission lines and insulators were being looked after properly and the safeguard system against the load did not collapse.

It was Guddu plant, which went out of the system owing to which frequency instantly dropped to zero from 50, but it is yet to be known in which circuit the fault appeared, he had said.

Ayub had said Sunday night that electricity had been restored in 80% of the country.

He had said the coal power plants would be functional by Sunday night and the nuclear power plants by Monday. Under the protocol, nuclear power plants take one-and-a-half days or two days to become functional. Once all the plants come on stream, hydrogenation will be reduced.

Committee shaped to research blackout

The NTDC has made a four-member inquiry committee to research the countrywide energy outage.

GM North Malik Javeed Mehmood, NTDC GM technical Ghulam Abbas Memon, NTDC CE Atif Mujeeb Usmani and Chief Engineer (Network) NPCC Sajjad Akhtar are within the committee.

A notification by the NTDC learn that Mehmood would be the convener and the three others its members.

The committee will examine the explanations/info resulting in the collapse of the facility system. It would additionally maintain any officer/official answerable for negligence in discharge of responsibility.

The committee has been tasked with suggesting prevention measures to maintain such incidents from taking place once more.

It will submit its report in seven days.