There has long been a strong case for privatization of the power transmission network in Pakistan. For the faithless, Nepra’s performance evaluation report about K-Electric’s performance will surely help them become a believer.
Nepra’s report on K-Electric’s performance is encouraging given that the company has improved on most counts. K-Electric was given a transmission license in 2010 by Nepra for a period of 20 years and has a transmission network of 1253 km including 220kV, 132 kV and 66kV lines. It operates 64 grid stations, 14 auto transformers and 138 transformers as of Jun-17.
According to the report, the total outages registered a decrease of 31 percent as compared to the previous year. Mind you the report is dated and is for the period 2016-17 but the general trend of improvement in KE’s transmission performance can still be gauged.
KE has also witnessed considerable progress in its energy not sold (ENS) over the past several years. However, there is still a lot of room for further improvement given the total ENS for the period was 2.85 million kWh which translates into the almost Rs36.5 million wasted based on KE’s average unit selling rate.
NTDC’s performance has been anything but adequate over the past years and there are several reasons for it. Keeping the technical parameters on one side, recall that Nepra’s State of Industry 2017 highlighted delays in project execution by the organization which resulted in cost overruns running into billions of rupees.
The regulator also pointed out the lack of utilisation of soft loans to NTDC due to the lack of management skills and generally poor governance which is evident in almost all state-owned enterprises.
On the other hand, the improvement witnessed in KE’s transmission network is hardcore evidence of the benefits of opening up the transmission to the private sector. This will automatically bring efficiency and encourage much needed investment in an area that has long been ignored by successive governments.
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