What happened : Dwellers in certain parts of the city had to put up with power outages amidst the scorching temperatures caused by a nationwide heatwave. On Wednesday the total demand of the Lahore Electric Supply Company (LESCO) touched 4500 MW and suffered a more than 800 MW shortfall out of their 3,700 MW supply. To stabilize the system and spread the load the company was forced to switch many city feeders, causing power outages that lasted for more than 6 hours. The company hopes for an improvement in power supply over the next few days. Why did it happen: The power outages were not just because of a generation shortfall but were also ‘revenue based’. Similar trends were seen in other distribution companies; in Peshawar Electric Supply Company (Pesco) which took a hit of up to 10 hours and Quetta Electric Supply Company (Quesco) 4 to 20 hours. Moreover, the power outages can also be linked to an overall weak structure. The transmission systems in certain areas are not strong enough to cope with the power load. As a result, on Wednesday the 132 MW lines collapsed over distribution issues. Moreover, circumstantial issues such as the mismanagement caused by the ‘clean operation’ on Walton road and the refusal of independent power producers to generate power overpayment issues all culminated in troubling circumstances.
Large parts of #Lahore are suffering from power outage since 1am tonight. LESCO's helpline service is continuously busy and excusing it's consumers in the name of unknown "maintenance". #Loadshedding
— Ajmal Jami (@ajmaljami) June 9, 2021
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