With prolonged loadshedding and daily protests against the government and WAPDA, there’s little to celebrate when it comes to electricity in Pakistan. However, the Ministry of Water and Power has announced a new milestone in power generation. Pakistan has produced its highest peak electricity on Wednesday at 3 PM.
Pakistan’s electric grid received 17,720MW of electricity, setting a national record. Such records are not uncommon for any country in this day and age as capacity has to be constantly increased as power demands continue to rise.
Electricity was generated from the following sources:
However, Pakistan’s grid only beat the previous record after about 11 months, hinting at a slow power capacity growth.
Last year on June 19th, power production peaked at 17,430MW. It was the highest recorded power production value in Pakistan until yesterday. During the whole year, Pakistan’s peak capacity grew by a mere 290MW even though several power plants have been inaugurated and linked to the power grid during this time. The overall production capacity has remained largely the same for the past several years.
Pakistan power demand continues to grow and was about 21,000MW yesterday. While the shortfall was ‘just’ 3,300MW, it peaks to over 7,500MW during the summer season and results in loadshedding of 8 hours or more.
On the other hand, Minister for Water and Power, Khawaja Asif claims that there has been no unannounced loadshedding in the whole country despite the high demand and failure to meet it. We’ll leave you to be the judge of that statement.