By Zahiruddin
CHITRAL: A colossal loss looms large over the generating machinery of the first unit of Golen Gol hydro power station commissioned to work recently due to the unwarranted load shedding by Peshawar Electric Supply Company (PESCO) leading to fall of load on it below the bare minimum possible required limit.
A technical source in the project told Chitral Times that for each running generator of a hydro-power station, there is a fixed minimum power load which must be kept maintained on it in order to keep it safe from overheating besides abnormal increase in its amplitude of vibration causing structural damage.
He said that in case of Golen power house whose first unit of 36-MW generation capacity has been inaugurated in February last, the minimum load limit is 2 MW which approaches to zero when PESCO makes load shedding pushing the machinery towards hyper risk.
He said that as the transmission line is yet to be completed to connect it to the national grid at Chakdara, so the consumption of the electricity generated by the power station is confined to Chitral only which is about 5 MW and keeping it in view the maximum generation capacity has been lowered to 7 MW.
He said that in the prevailing situation, the shutdown of the power house was the only solution to save it from the great loss it was heading to due to the outage of electricity.
The project manager of the project Engineer Javed Afridi confirmed the risk and said that they had time and again pointed out the impending disaster to the PESCO high ups advising it to give up load shedding process.
He said that till the completion of the transmission line and evacuation of the entire product to the national grid, the risk of overheating of the machinery will persist if the power load decreases to zero on it.
The Chitral DC Irshad Sodhar said that the load shedding of electricity by PESCO is totally unwarranted which no one can justify as the obnoxious practice of outage for 5 to 7 hours on daily basis is affecting 40 thousand consumers across the district.
He said that the ground of load shedding in Chitral as stated by PESCO is that it was aimed at recovering the defaulting amount of electricity bills but it is fictitious and misleading notion.
“The practice of forced load shedding is carried out in such areas where there is shortfall of electricity and it is used as incentive or punishment to the consumers as the duration of outage is elongated for an area with large sum of outstanding amount and vice versa.
In case of Chitral, it is quite inapplicable because of the availability of superfluous amount of electricity, less amount of money as outstanding charges against the consumers and the fact that there were 23 thousand consumers of the energy department of provincial government who are being punished for their no fault”, he said.
Mr. Sodhar said that the practice of load shedding is creating law and order situation in this peaceful and tranquil district as protests and demonstrations against it have become the order of the day and it may result in a full-scale uprising any time.
When the line superintendant of PESCO Junaid Khan was contacted to know his version, he said that they were carrying out the outage by the orders of the high-ups and the local office had no say in it.
He said that the load shedding regime was being controlled by Provincial Distribution Centre (PDC) of PESCO situated at Peshawar and the outage of carried out at Chitral Grid station as per schedule issued by them.
Meanwhile, the lawyers’ fraternity has filed application with police station Chitral for registration of FIR against the chief executive officer and other officers of PESCO for unwarranted power outage in Chitral.
The muharrir of the police station told Dawn that an application has been received from district bar association president, Khurshid Hussain Mughal and inquiry was being initiated under sections 156 and 157 of CrPC before FIR is registered.
