Large swaths of Pakistan were left without electricity on Monday, as efforts were still ongoing to restore power in the debt-laden country.
The incident was the second in three months in the country of 220 million people, with the energy minister giving as cause this time a power-saving measure that went wrong.
In order to save power, the government cut power on Sunday night when consumption was at a low point. When the grid employees tried to turn the power on at dawn, a high-voltage indication forced them to turn the grid off again to try to find a way to fix it.
“As an economic measure, we temporarily shut down our power generation systems,“ Energy Minister Khurram Dastgir said. When engineers tried to turn the systems back on, a “fluctuation in voltage” was observed, which “forced engineers to shut down the power grid” stations one by one.
“We are hoping that the supply of electricity will be fully restored tonight,” he said, adding that everything was being done to achieve this.
Karachi, the country’s largest city and economic hub, was without power Monday, as well as the capital Islamabad and other major cities and small towns.
Six hours after schools, factories, and hospitals reported outages during cold weather, power was restored to some parts of the country.
In Peshawar, a city of more than 2.3 million people, some residents said they had no drinking water because their pumps were powered by electricity. Telecom companies and several hospitals said they had switched to backup generators, but disruptions remained.
The previous power outage happened in October 2022.
Like much of the national infrastructure, Pakistan’s grid desperately needs an upgrade that the government, which has lurched from one International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout to the next, says it can ill afford.
Pakistan has enough installed power capacity to meet demand, but it lacks resources to run its oil-and-gas-powered plants, and the sector is so heavily in debt that it cannot afford to invest in infrastructure and power lines.
Internet-access advocacy group NetBlocks.org said network data showed a significant decline in internet access in Pakistan that was attributed to the power outage. It said metrics indicate that connectivity was at 60 percent of ordinary levels, as many users struggled to get online Monday.
Pakistan is grappling with one of the country’s worst economic crises in recent years amid dwindling foreign exchange reserves. This has compelled the government to order shopping malls and markets to close by 8:30 p.m. to conserve energy.
Talks are underway with the IMF to soften some conditions on Pakistan’s $6 billion bailout, which government officials think will trigger further inflation hikes. The IMF released the last crucial tranche of $1.1 billion to Islamabad in August 2022.
The Chinese regime has invested heavily in Pakistan, giving it loans for the building of infrastructure as part of a $60 billion “Belt and Road” scheme.
The Belt and Road scheme has been criticized as a project to bury developing countries in debt, having them forced to give to the Chinese regime vital parts of their natural resources or strategic infrastructure, such as ports, as a payment for the debt.
