Saturday, October 18, 2008, Shawwal 18, 1429    

Minister directs PEPCO to avoid unscheduled loadshedding

Staff Reporter

Islamabad—Federal Minister for Water and Power, Raja Pervez Ashraf has directed the PEPCO to devise a strategy to handle the prevailing energy crisis and asked to reduce load shedding duration. He further directed that there should be no unscheduled load shedding and warned the CEOs of DISCOs to place their system in order so that the existing state of affairs could be arrested prudently.. He asked to take all the necessary measures to improve the generation capacity and enhance the efficiencies in order to provide relief to the consumers in this regard. He also directed PEPCO and Power Distribution Companies (DISCOs) to speed up their recovery campaign with rigorous efforts on war footing basis and bring out the utilities from the financial crisis. He asked them that they should pull all their available resources to make maximum recovery of current and outstanding amounts in coming days.

He made these instructions while chairing a high level meeting of PEPCO and all DISCOs to review the current power situation in the country here today. Advisor, Ministry of Water and Power, Managing Director PEPCO, Chief Executive Officers of all DISCOs and senior officers of Ministry and PEPCO were present on this occasion. The meeting was convened to discuss the prevailing critical power situation in the country.

The Minister expressed great concern over the prevailing power crises and asked PEPCO and DISCOs to confront the situation with rationale mechanism to reduce the miseries of the consumers. He took serious notice of unscheduled Load Shedding and directed the discos to follow the earlier policy of six hours load shedding in urban areas and eight hours load shedding in rural areas and make it clear that any deviation from this policy would be viewed very seriously.

He was of the view that with collective wisdom and concerted efforts the situation could be improved in a better way. He said that there would be no compromise on efficiency and poor performers would be taken to task severely. The meeting also observed that the current power situation will improve in coming days.