Thursday, 14 Oct, 2010 | 02:21 AM PST |

KARACHI, Oct 13: While the Karachi Electric Supply Company and the Sui Southern Gas Company were wrangling over the shortage of gas supply, residential and commercial consumers in the city experienced over six hours of loadshedding in the city on Wednesday.

A spokesperson for the SSGC, Inayet Ismail, claimed that after completion of the repair work at the Bhit gas plant, the gas supply to the KESC had been returned to normal on Wednesday. However, later in the evening, the spokesperson said that another problem hit the Bhit gas plant forcing the gas utility to further reduce the supply. The normal gas supply would be restored by Thursday evening, he added.

KESC spokesperson Amir Abbasi claimed that the gas supply had not been fully restored. The supply was restored partially following which the loadshedding in industrial areas was done away with. But domestic and commercial consumers would continue to suffer extended loadshedding until the gas supply was fully restored. The benefit had only been passed on to the industrial consumer, he added.

The KESC had said on Tuesday that that the power utility was increasing the duration of loadshedding spells by 30 minutes in all residential and commercial areas because of a “sudden fall” in the volume of gas supply since Monday night.

A KESC press release said that from 3pm Tuesday, the one-hour loadshedding, which carried out thrice in a day, in the ‘normal-loss areas’ was increased to one-and-half hour for each cycle, while in the ‘high-loss areas’ where the power utility normally carried out loadshedding for one-and-half hour duration thrice a day was increased to two hours for each cycle. The enhanced duration of loadshedding spells would continue till the restoration of normal gas supply.The gas supply was drastically curtailed on Monday night, to a bare minimum of 160 MMCFD as against the approved quota of KESC being 276 MMCFD. Any further decrease in gas supply would worsen the electricity situation in the city.

Meanwhile, as the media war on circular debt intensified, the SSGC hosted a dinner recently for corporate sector and also circulated a detailed KESC payment status.

While rejecting the SSGC’s contentions, the KESC had maintained that the circular debt was a national issue which caused a liquidity crisis and all energy sector companies were affected by it.

Industrialists slam power outages

Reacting strongly to the prolonged power outages in the SITE area, the SITE Association of Industry (SAI) has appealed to the government to take note of the situation and ensure uninterrupted power supply to the country’s largest industrial estate having more than 5,000 industries.

According to a press release, the SAI chairman, Abdul Wahab Lakhani, said that industries located in SITE had been badly hit as most of the small industries became idle due to non-availability of electricity.

It said that the association was informed that the loadshedding was carried out as the Karachi Electric Supply Company was not getting required gas supply from the Sui Southern Gas Company. Further inquiries revealed that SSGC had disconnected its supply because KESC was not making payments to the gas utility SSGC and billion of rupees had accumulated in arrears leading to this drastic step, the statement added.

Mr Lakhani stated that electricity consumers in general and industries of SITE in particular had been making regular payments of electricity bills to the power utility.The KESC hierarchy was morally bound to explain why the consumers should suffer on this count, he said, adding that the disruption of over three to four hours of electricity to the SITE area has caused a loss of nearly Rs1 billion in term of production alone.

He urged the government to take serious note of the incident and to ensure uninterrupted power supply to the SITE area.