Nepra approves a $47 billion generation plan and leaves two holes in it

Pakistan's National Electric Power Regulatory Authority approved the Integrated System Plan 2025 on Friday, a planning document that covers generation and transmission from 2025 to 2035. The generation slice is costed at about $47.1 billion. Transmission upgrades add about $10.65 billion. Dawn put the combined figure near $58 billion. The approval is conditional. All three members of the authority, including the chairman, attached dissenting or separate notes that run to more than 12 pages of a 45-page order.

The plan was filed by the Independent System and Market Operator. It projects peak demand rising from 26,950 megawatts in 2025 to 35,521 megawatts in 2035. To meet that load it adds 26,045 megawatts, of which 17,485 megawatts are already committed and 8,560 megawatts are newly optimised, and retires 2,577 megawatts. Installed capacity would then stand at 62,657 megawatts, including 8,120 megawatts of net metering.

Two large items did not survive the vote. A proposed battery energy storage system, costed near $900 million, was left out because its cost had not been run through ISMO's optimisation model. The authority asked for a full technical study before it would look again. A K-Electric interconnection listed for 2028 was also withheld. Members said the line needs about five years to build and that the date in the plan was not realistic.

The separate notes go further than those two cuts. Members questioned why some projects were in the case and others were out, and why the Council of Common Interests, the constitutional forum that handles national energy policy, had not seen the document. One account in The News said the country's cheapest renewable power had sat outside national planning for more than a year despite earlier warnings from the same regulator. That is an institutional failure stated in an approval order, not in an opposition press note.

Conditional approval means the Revised Base or Recommended Case of the IGCEP-2025, minus the battery system and the 2028 K-Electric line, together with a revised transmission expansion plan, can proceed once the authority's observations are answered. It does not mean every megawatt in the tables will be financed. Pakistan's power sector already carries capacity payments on plants that run below the utilisation assumed when they were contracted. Adding 26 gigawatts on top of that stock only works if demand arrives on the forecast path and if the plants that are retired actually close.

The CCI point is the one that can still unwind the paper. Energy is a shared subject. A plan that sets a decade of generation mix without that forum is open to a later political challenge from a province that does not like the mix. Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have used that lever before. The members who wrote the notes know that history. They approved the case anyway and left the objection on the record.

ISMO now has to answer the observations before the approved case becomes a document banks can use. That correspondence will decide whether the generation envelope is a working plan or a set of tables with footnotes. Transmission is a separate procurement problem. Lines take longer than plants. A 2028 interconnection that needs five years was never a 2028 line.

For households the document will show up, if it shows up, as the next round of capacity additions and as the fate of net metering at 8,120 megawatts. For investors it is a map with two holes where storage and a Karachi tie-line should be. For the regulator it is a 45-page reminder that it can pass a plan and still decline to own every project inside it.