Photo: Collected-
Metropolis Desk-
A day after a statewide breakdown left the nation of 220 million people without electricity, most cities in Pakistan received power again. The breakdown, caused by a cost-cutting strategy as Pakistan struggles with an economic crisis, began at approximately 7:30 am (0230 GMT) on Monday.
On Monday night, Energy Minister Khurram Dastgir Khan stated that power was being progressively restored. The megacities of Karachi and Lahore had electricity for the most part again overnight, but there were still occasional, brief outages of connection.
The lights were reported to be back on in Islamabad, as well as in Rawalpindi, Quetta, Peshawar, and Gujranwala. Some rural communities, though, were still without a connection. The nation’s electricity grid is a delicate, intricate web, and issues can easily snowball.
As electricity-producing units were turned on early on Monday morning, Khan claimed that a change in frequency on the national grid was to blame for the outage. He had earlier told reporters that the units are momentarily turned off during the cold nights to conserve fuel.
In Pakistan, localized power outages are frequent, and hospitals, companies, and governmental institutions frequently rely on private generators to maintain operations. But most people and small businesses cannot afford the machinery.
Temperatures were expected to plunge below freezing in several areas of northern Pakistan over the course of the next few hours, and load-shedding would make natural gas supplies unstable, the most frequent form of heating.
