Electricity returned to Pakistan on Tuesday, January 24, the day after a gigantic blackout which resulted in millions of euros in losses for the industry. The blackout began at around 7:30 a.m. local time on Monday, affecting nearly the entire country of 220 million people and its largest cities. Mobile phone services were also disrupted, the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority tweeted.
Electricity returned overnight in major urban centers, including the megacities of Karachi and Lahore. Power was back on across the country around 5:15 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Energy Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan said. Load shedding – which spares the industry – will however be frequent over the next two days, the time to restart all nuclear and coal-fired power stations, he warned at a press conference in Islamabad.
“The factory must be restarted from scratch”
The failure is linked to a cost reduction measure taken in the context of an economic crisis. According to Mr. Khan, the outage was caused by a variation in the electrical frequency on the national grid, when the power generation units restarted on Monday morning, temporarily switched off at night in winter to save fuel.
The secretary general of the Association of Textile Factories of Pakistan, Shahid Sattar, estimated at 70 million dollars (64 million euros) the losses in this essential sector, which represents approximately 60% of Pakistani exports. Nearly 90% of the country’s textile factories had to close on Monday due to the cut, he told Agence France-Presse:
“Every time there is a power outage, factories have to be restarted from scratch, which takes a lot of time and energy. We can’t pick up where we left off. All these threads that are being dyed or treated, we can no longer reuse them. This causes huge losses. »
Pakistan’s economy is already faltering amid soaring inflation, a plummeting national currency – the rupee – and low foreign exchange reserves. Such a power outage only increases the pressure on small businesses. The country’s electricity system is a complex and fragile network, where malfunctions can quickly multiply and power cuts are a recurring problem.
Most hospitals, industries and government institutions have backup generators, but small businesses and households often cannot afford them. In Karachi, hundreds of water pumps failed during the blackout, adding to the difficulties of the already fragile water supply sector in Pakistan’s largest city, which has 15 million people. ‘inhabitants.
A similar outage in January 2021 plunged most of the country into darkness, after a technical malfunction in the South.