While K Electrics success story shrivels away with severe unending and unannounced power cuts in Karachi, the Ministry of Water and Power has adopted the firms practice of load management, at least as per the ad it published in the print media last week.
Since the beginning of Ramadan, there has been a lot of clamour and outcry over power shortages across the country. Power consumers all around - including those of KEs - have experienced stark fluctuations in the normal electricity loadshedding, the answer to which can partly be found in Ministry of Water and Power Pakistans load management announcement.
It has been witnessed that while some cities particularly Lahore are facing less hours of power cut, other areas have started to experience increased hours without electricity. This is because of the new uneven yet rational load management plan. It must be highlighted here that this loss/recovery based loadshedding has only been a K-Electrics modus operandi for load management, and till now it has received appreciation as against across-the-board loadshedding. However, tides seem to have changed now especially when comparing Karachi and Lahore.
A first glance at the details reveals that the load management plan is based largely city-wise with further division of the feeders. So Hyderabad (feeder name: Bohri Bazar) with loss and theft of around 95 percent, faces 14-18 hours of loadshedding, and Lahore (feeder name: Rao Khan Wala) with losses of around 37 percent faces power cuts of 9-6 hours.
Assuming that the loss factor is correctly assigned city-wise, it can be seen that most of Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa fall in larger loss areas while Punjab seems to be better with theft and bill recovery.
While this recovery-based mechanism has its properties of discouraging theft and other malpractices in the power distribution and transmission sector, one lacuna in the publicized plan is not an exhaustive list of cities and their respective feeders; the mere absence of Islamabad, and most of Punjab cities can become a source of contention between the provinces with Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Sindh already bearing the brunt of high losses.
Also, one fails to understand why the government continues to practice poor informative and integration skills. Apart from the published ad, there has been no discussion around loss-based loadshedding regime as such.

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Power Loss    Load Shedding
and Theft          duration
===========================
Less than 30%       6 hours
30-40%              8 hours
40-50%             10 hours
50-60%             12 hours
60-80%             14 hours
80-90%             16 hours
More than 90%      18 hours
===========================