Power breakdown as terrorists blow up grid
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Daneshmand
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When there is a blackout, how do you guys come online? How life goes by? Do people have backup systems?
It is really bad. Only the city of Tehran consumes over 9,000 MW of electricity in peak demand time, with comsumption in whole of Iran hovering around 50,000 MW. I reckon with 190 million people in Pakistan and the supply of only 7,000 MW there must be alot of load on the grid. How do they manage this load there, by rotating black outs or by letting voltage and hertz to go down?
It is really bad. Only the city of Tehran consumes over 9,000 MW of electricity in peak demand time, with comsumption in whole of Iran hovering around 50,000 MW. I reckon with 190 million people in Pakistan and the supply of only 7,000 MW there must be alot of load on the grid. How do they manage this load there, by rotating black outs or by letting voltage and hertz to go down?
Abii
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Wait, the whole of Pakistan uses 7K MW of power? For 200 million people? How the hell is that even possible? You literally have to have a fridge in your house and that's it. Even then you're going over 7K MW if all households had a fridge. Basically half the country must be running on steam power then lol
WishLivePak
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The consuming is 17000mw. Of course it is far more than that, but this is what the gov't can deliver at most (hence max consumption per availability). They have capacity of 24000mw, but the national grid cannot handle over 1.7gw and some capacity isn't used/broken machines etc.
I think the ministry doesn't know what it is talking about.
Daneshmand
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Well, the news article does not say that. It says the current consumption (the actual supply) is 7,000 MW and the demand is 14,000 MW. It means there is 50% shortage which would mean either the voltage has to drop down to less than half or half the people must be without electricity at any one time. Theoretically the real situation will be worse since, there is line losses due to wire resistance, and there is background load (the places that need uninterrupted supply eg. military installations, major hospitals, command centers of government and the command centers of the electric grid itself etc etc). So the situation must be quite bleak.
WishLivePak
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The demand is 17gw (max can they also deliver per grid lines). The demand cannot be going down instead of increasing, for 17gw demand has been around for quite some time.
This article is about a year old. It says the average demand is 17gw. Are we to say that demand has decreased by 3gw instead of increasing over one years of time?
Pakistan’s energy security – The Express Tribune
Note, previous comments I have mixed up gw/mw. I hope people know what I mean.
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A view of a Karachi neighbourhood after Saturday night’s power breakdown. PHOTO: EXPRESS
LAHORE / QUETTA / ISLAMABAD / KARACHI: Almost all of Pakistan plunged into darkness around 11:50 pm on Saturday night as an attack by Baloch separatists on transmission lines near Naseerabad in Balochistan caused nearly the entire national grid to trip, shutting down electricity supply to over 80% of the country.
The transmission tower blown up was near Notal, a town in Naseerabad district in Balochistan, confirmed Sharbat Umrani, the head of the local police station. The damage to the 220 kilovolt-Amperes (kVA) transmission lines between Sibi and Quetta caused a backward surge of power to the Guddu power plant in Sindh, which in turn caused a cascading effect on the entire national grid, said Water and Power Secretary Younus Dagha.
“It might take a while to fix, hopefully we will be able to control the situation by morning,” he said. “We have restored the Guddu power plant and have also started production from Tarbela.”
The attack near Notal is the third attack on the nation’s energy grid in two weeks in Naseerabad. Later at night, water and power ministry officials said that the Kotri and Uch I power plants had also been restored and that power plants at Tarbela, Mangla and Ghazi Barotha dams had also been turned on, which would result in power being restored by 5 am on Sunday morning. Officials at the National Transmission and Dispatch Company (NTDC) said that as the restoration work proceeds, Islamabad will get power first, followed by pockets of Lahore, Gujranwala and Faisalabad.
Almost all of Pakistan was in darkness on Saturday night, with no electricity available in Punjab, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, Islamabad or Balochistan. Some parts of Sindh still had electricity, but even most parts of Sindh were in darkness.
The breakdown followed daylong media coverage of the dangerously low level of furnace oil stock, which helps run a most of the thermal power plants in the country. But Dagha toldThe Express Tribune around 12:45am that he suspected sabotage. “We cannot rule out sabotage activity. I am in the control room myself and we are all trying to figure out what has happened,” he said. “Our first priority is to bring back this system online.”
Earlier in the night, there had been speculation that the system had tripped due to a decline in power production as the country’s power plants run dangerously low on furnace oil supplies. Dagha ruled out this explanation. “We had pushed up power production to 9,500 MW by evening. Even 800 MW more of hydroelectric power generation was available.”
Power consumption over the last few days has hovering around the 14,000 MW mark. “Before this breakdown we were successfully managing the shortage by carrying out load shedding for industrial consumers,” Dagha said.
The government has shut down natural gas supply to state-owned power plants in Punjab in order to supply gas to the inefficient captive power plants run large textile companies, resulting in approximately one-third of the country’s power generation supply being unavailable to handle the load.
This is not the first time that 500KVA loop has collapsed. But in almost all the cases the cause has been a sudden shutdown of power supply at point that led to chain-reaction throughout the system. A major part of the thermal generation is concentrated in Sindh while the hydel power comes from north and the main load center where most of the consumption takes places lies in heart of Punjab.
People associated with the power industry said this was expected to happen considering the lethargy on part of government officials especially in arranging furnace oil supply.
Government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that most power plants were reliant on production at local refineries for their furnace oil supplies. Domestic refineries only have the capacity to supply 40% of Pakistan’s total refined fuel needs. The remainder is often imported in refined form. However, the country’s largest oil importer, Pakistan State Oil, currently has virtually no inventory left of furnace oil, resulting in a severe shortage of fuel in the country.
The water and power ministry continued to deny that there was a shortage of furnace oil in the country, claiming that the country had a ten-day supply of furnace oil, even as power plants at Jamshoro and Muzaffargarh continued to operate at less than a quarter of their capacity due to low fuel reserves.
PSO’s financial troubles have led banks to refuse lending to the company for its oil import needs. The company has defaulted on Rs46 billion of Letters of Credit (LCs), and international banks have blocked Rs110 billion worth of LCs for PSO. The company will be unable to resume importing oil until it can pay back the Rs46 billion in LCs.
At a meeting of government officials chaired by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, it had been decided that the government would release Rs40 billion in funds to state-owned power companies so that they could pay their bills to PSO for fuel. That injection of liquidity could have solved PSO’s immediate cash crunch, but the decision to release the funds was then delayed.
The government tried the alternative path of asking domestic refineries to directly supply power plants in the country, but they do not have the capacity to meet total demand.
Power breakdown: Nationwide blackout – The Express Tribune
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Daneshmand
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I guess you are confusing the demand with consumption. The demand might be for 17 GW. In fact it should be much higher for 190 million people. (For instance the province of Ontario in Canada with a population of 13 million people has a peak demand of about 23 GW).
As the article you linked says, the demand was NOT met and there was a shortfall of 5 GW. Which means only 12 GW was being produced and supplied and consumed.
The demand is calculated by the load system is experiencing. If that load is met, then it means there is enough supply. If that load is not met, the demand is going to remain but the supply is not adequate.
As the article of this thread says, right now only 7 GW is being produced which means only 7 GW is being consumed. But the demand is for 14 GW which means that half of the demand is not being met.
Take this example. There is demand for 15 potatoes in market. There is only a supply for 7. It means that only 7 potatoes will be consumed but if there were more potatoes around (more supply), then 8 more potatoes could have been consumed. But right now only 7 potatoes have been consumed since there is a shortage in supply.
No problem about mix up of MW/GW. Just know this that 1000 MW becomes 1 GW.
Also note that the article you lined talks about average demand over a year which is 17 GW. And this thread is talking about the current demand which is 14 GW. Since Pakistan is a summer harsh country, the peak demand must be in summer times which probably is much higher than 17 GW. In winter, the demand must be going down hence the figure of 14 GW right now.
But what amazed me was not this demand figure, but the production and consumption figure of 7 GW which is very very low for a population of 190 million people. If you take out the line losses and the back ground load then each person would be left with only less than 20 watts to consume. That would be a small bulb or perhaps just enough to charge a tablet computer.
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You're right.
But the article says: Demand is 17,000mw
Ministry says: Demand is 14,000mw.
This is what I'm confused about. How can demand go lower after one year. But then perhaps you're right and the author is saying average demand is 17gw a year (doesn't say in article explicitly and the article was posted in January last year, so I thought I could be comparing apples to apples here, demand being in the fall season) and current demand is 14,000mw. Either way, I agree that the demand is extremely low for a country like Pakistan.
Just a note, Canada is a cold country and has a lot of electric stoves and heating, so it will be having greater electric demand than Pakistan.
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