
Government of Pakistan claims that the demand for electricity in the country is 24,000MW and the shortfall is 5,000MW. Fair enough.
But then, we see 20 hours of load-shedding in rural areas and 12-14 hours in urban centers in a day. The amount of load-shedding and the amount of shortfall do not add up. So let’s do some simple math to figure out what is going on.
Let’s assume that 30% of the total population of the country lives in urban centers like Lahore, Faisalabad, Karachi, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, etc. While 70% of the population lives in rural towns and villages (Toba Tek Singh, Mardan etc).
Now if Urban centers on average receive 10 hours of electricity in a day. That’s about 42% of the time with electricity and 58% without electricity in a 24 hour period.
Using the same logic, the rural centers receive no more than 4 hours of electricity in a day. So that’s about 17% of the 24 hours that they have electricity while a whopping 83% of the time there is none.
Now let’s add the two sums up. The 30% of Urban as a percentage of total (urban + rural) will add up to only 12% of the time that the urban centers get electricity. While the 70% of the rural as a percentage of the total country will be no more than 13% of the electricity.
So by adding 12%+13% we get 25% of the total time the nation has electricity at any given time.
So if the total requirement is 24,000 MW, then 25% of that would be no more than 6,000MW. Hence, the total production in the country is 6,000MW while the shortfall is 18,000MW.
It is now evident that the government’s estimates of shortfall and production are wrong. Either the people who are calculating these numbers are incompetent or the numbers are being deliberately fudged.
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