Pakistan's power shortfall tops 4,000 MW as an RLNG cargo misses the port

Pakistan's electricity shortfall has moved past 4,000 megawatts. The Lahore Electric Supply Company is carrying more than 1,200 megawatts of that gap on its own network. Residents in Lahore told local reporters the supply is going off for an hour after every hour. Other parts of Punjab are seeing two to three hours of load-shedding.

National Transmission and Despatch Company sources said generation had fallen at several plants. Plants were being run below capacity to conserve gas and oil. An RLNG vessel that was due at port did not arrive, which tightened the fuel stack for the gas-fired fleet. Network tripping on the LESCO system added cuts that had nothing to do with the national megawatt maths.

Daytime is slightly easier than night. Solar plants are feeding about 7,000 megawatts into the grid when the sun is up, which narrows the daytime hole and leaves the evening peak exposed. That pattern matches what households describe: longer cuts after dark, shorter gaps at noon.

The Punjab Assembly passed a unanimous resolution on Friday against the outages and questioned the government's energy policy. Lawmakers heard that the province has identified 1,000 megawatts of possible wind capacity in Rajanpur and 800 megawatts of solar-wind hybrid projects in the same belt. Those sites are not generating this week's missing 4,000 megawatts. A biogas plant in Gujjarpura Basti, Lahore, finished an expansion on 1 March. It is a local plant, not a system fix.

Bills are moving the other way from supply. On 7 August the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority approved a nationwide increase of 0.75 Pakistani rupees per unit under the monthly fuel-cost adjustment for June. The raise applies to K-Electric customers as well and shows up in August bills. Households are paying more per unit for fewer hours of power.

The immediate cause is fuel and derating, not a new collapse of the grid map. When an RLNG cargo misses the berth, gas plants cut output. When oil is conserved, furnace-oil units stay off or low. When feeders trip, LESCO loses megawatts that were already scarce. The 4,000-megawatt figure is the sum of those three problems on the same day.

Pakistan has lived through this sequence before. What is different this week is the coincidence with a delayed gas cargo and a tariff adjustment landing in the same billing cycle. The resolution in Lahore does not dock a ship. Until the missing RLNG arrives and the derated plants are allowed to burn fuel again, the hour-on, hour-off pattern in Punjab is the operating schedule.