In yesterday’s inauguration of the Lowari Tunnel in Chitral, the Prime Minister once again claimed to have brought an end to the darkness that had engulfed the masses due to chronic power outages.
But this is far from true with unscheduled loadshedding still taking place across the country while even scheduled power outages stand at more than six hours in major cities. The situation is much worse in rural and semi-urban areas.
Taking stock of the IMFs recently projected power sector capacity and demand statistics and comparing it with the NTDC projections in the NEPRA State of Industry Report 2016 there seem to be different timelines for when the power deficit will actually be met.
In the above table NTDC projects a deficit of 500MW in 2018 but illustrates a steeply increasing surplus after that which will reach 4694MW by 2021. It also puts the installed capacity at 41950MW by the end of that year.
However, the IMF projects that the deficit will be briefly met in 2018 but that it will re-emerge for another four years till 2022. There is two other interesting take-away from the graph. One is the fact that the IMF after accounting for both CPEC and non-CPEC related projects, puts the power sector capacity around 26000MW by 2021. This is in stark contrast to NTDC’s projections which show the installed capacity to be 41950MW for the same period. IMF projections do not reach 40000MW much further down the road by 2024 even. Secondly, the addition of non-CPEC energy projects will result in almost four times the power generation capacity as compared to CPEC projects in the next seven years.
One major reason behind the discrepancy is the fact that both the NTDC and IMF have used different projected demand growth rates for energy demand. The Fund uses a 6 percent constant growth rate over the projection horizon while surprisingly the NTDC uses a decreasing growth rate which starts from 6 percent but goes down to 4.89 percent by 2021. This column feels that this is not a realistic assumption given that economic growth is set to increase at a decent pace in the coming years. Conveniently, tweaking the growth rate downwards also explains the steep surplus that will be available by 2021 according to the NTDC.
To sum it up by its own account the NTDC believes there will be a generation shortfall till 2018. Post 2018, the IMF projections indicate that the power deficit will continue till 2022 at least. And that too is dependent upon the pace of completion of both CPEC and non-CPEC related energy projects.
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