🔳 Forced load shedding continues in Pakistan despite the availability of electricity, because the country’s outdated transmission infrastructure is incapable of carrying the load. Yet the public is repeatedly told that there is simply “no electricity.”
🔲 Public Investigative Series | Episode 25
Subject: How Can Pakistan Fix Its Electricity System?
Title: The Misdiagnosis of Electricity
🔺When institutions avoid providing facts, the responsibility of reaching the truth falls upon the public.
Research and Writing: Syed Shayan
You may have often heard the phrase: “The disease kept worsening as the treatment increased.”
Something very similar happened in Pakistan’s electricity sector. The more power plants the country continued to build, the more expensive and inaccessible electricity became for ordinary citizens. Instead of improving, the crisis deepened further with time.
Just as incorrect treatment worsens a patient’s illness rather than curing it, Pakistan’s electricity crisis followed the same path. As the number of private power plants increased, the energy crisis intensified almost in parallel. Electricity became increasingly expensive and scarce, gradually moving beyond the reach of ordinary people.
One of the primary reasons behind this was the misdiagnosis of the problem itself. According to my research, Pakistan’s real issue was never electricity generation. The actual crisis lay in transmission, distribution, line losses, electricity theft, personal interests, and policy failure. Yet the prescribed solution remained focused almost entirely on increasing generation capacity.
Power plants continued to increase, but the systems responsible for delivering electricity efficiently to end users were never strengthened.
For decades, Pakistan has consistently generated between 12,000 and 15,000 megawatts of electricity. Had the country simply strengthened the systems responsible for transmitting and distributing that electricity, while simultaneously controlling theft enabled through corruption within the system itself, Pakistan may never have faced an electricity crisis at all. Nor would the country have felt compelled to establish such a vast network of IPPs.
I still firmly believe that even if the government had built only two to four additional power plants on its own, the resulting electricity generation would have exceeded national requirements. But because of commissions, personal interests, flawed priorities, and poor planning, the political and civil leadership of the country pushed the nation into a crisis whose burden is now carried by every Pakistani citizen.
Just as incorrect medical treatment eventually pushes a patient closer to death, flawed policies have pushed Pakistan’s electricity system into a permanent and escalating crisis. Today, that crisis manifests itself through expensive electricity, circular debt, collapsing industries, public frustration, and economic weakness.
It has now become increasingly evident that the electricity Pakistan was already generating was not only sufficient for national demand, but in certain respects may even have exceeded actual requirements.
So where did the real problem emerge?
The problem emerged for two major reasons:
1. The first was the weakness of Pakistan’s transmission and distribution systems, where a significant portion of generated electricity was lost before reaching consumers because of outdated infrastructure, weak transmission lines, technical failures, and severe line losses.
2. The second major reason was electricity theft. This problem was not confined merely to large industries or factories. It spread street by street and neighbourhood by neighbourhood, where ordinary consumers, often in collusion with corrupt officials, illegally fulfilled domestic, commercial, and industrial electricity needs.
In other words, the crisis was never about generating electricity. The real challenge was delivering electricity efficiently to cities, homes, factories, farms, and businesses.
Weak transmission systems and electricity theft hollowed out the entire structure, yet the chosen response remained the construction of new power plants. The result is that Pakistan today possesses surplus generation capacity, while citizens continue to suffer under expensive electricity, capacity charges, and circular debt.
After completing my extensive report on Pakistan’s electricity crisis and the IPP system, I arrived at the following conclusions:
1. Every government in Pakistan adopted new power plants and IPPs as a “shortcut solution” because their benefits appeared immediate and politically visible. Meanwhile, the actual disease, transmission lines, grid systems, and infrastructure modernisation, was neglected.
2. When electricity passes through old wires, weak grids, deteriorating transmission lines, and outdated distribution networks, a significant portion is lost in the form of heat. Pakistan’s Transmission and Distribution losses remain far higher than the averages observed in most countries around the world.
One of the central causes behind Pakistan’s ongoing power sector crisis has been the serious planning failures of NTDC, the National Transmission and Dispatch Company, now renamed the National Grid Company of Pakistan Limited (NGC). The institution is responsible for the country’s 220 kV and 500 kV transmission systems and grid stations, carrying electricity from power plants to major cities and load centres.
According to reports published by the Islamabad based think tank PIDE, the absence of a properly approved Transmission System Expansion Plan, combined with inaccurate demand forecasting, prevented the grid from evolving according to modern technical requirements. In many cases, transmission bottlenecks and delays in building interconnections for power plants meant that even efficient and low cost plants could not supply their full electricity output into the system. The burden of this transmission inadequacy is ultimately transferred to ordinary consumers through capacity payments, because plants remain idle despite being technically ready to operate.
As criticism surrounding NTDC’s performance intensified, the current Federal Minister for Power and Energy restructured the organisation into three separate institutions. The National Grid Company of Pakistan (NGC) will now manage transmission infrastructure and grid stations. The National Electric Market Operator and Administrator (NEMA) will oversee electricity markets and financial matters, while the Independent System and Market Operator (ISMO) will supervise dispatch, transmission operations, and load management on technical and merit based principles. According to the minister, the purpose of this restructuring is to end institutional monopoly and improve Pakistan’s weak transmission and dispatch systems.
However, a closer examination reveals that Pakistan’s real need was never merely institutional restructuring. The real requirement was investment in transmission lines, grid stations, smart distribution systems, and mechanisms capable of reducing electricity theft.
One major reason this never became the central priority was because large power plants, multi billion dollar contracts, imported fuels, foreign financing, capacity payments, and long term agreements created greater opportunities for commissions, political interests, lobbying, personal gains, and foreign influence. By comparison, investing in transmission upgrades, grid modernisation, and reducing line losses was considered far less glamorous, less political, and less financially attractive.
As a result, Pakistan spent billions of dollars generating electricity while neglecting the systems responsible for delivering it.
And yet I repeatedly find myself thinking that if only 5 percent of the capacity payments paid to IPPs over the past two decades had instead been invested in transmission systems, smart grids, modern grid stations, and reducing line losses, Pakistan might never have faced the devastating electricity crisis that has paralysed its economy, industries, and public life despite all its planning failures and administrative incompetence.
To be continued in the next episode.
