Pak minister orders early completion of fast track power projects

Islamabad: Federal Minister for Water and Power Raja Pervaiz Ashraf has underlined the need for working on war footings to overcome power shortage in the country. He was presiding over a meeting of cabinet committee on Fast Track Power Generation.

In order to achieve the objective of generation power on fast track, we have to work on war footing basis to accomplish the task in the minimum time,' the minister observed. He directed all concerned quarters to give top priority to complete fast track power projects as early as possible.

The Minister once again directed PEPCO to avoid unscheduled load shedding and all DISCO to ensure uninterrupted supply to the consumers on Sehri and Iftar as according to him the generation capacity has now been increased as compare to last year.

He said that the present govt was striving hard to tackle the prevailing energy crisis in the country and the Ministry was working on war footing to get rid of this crisis in shortest possible time. He also appealed to the people to cooperate with the govt by ensuring judicious use of electricity and conservation measures.

The committee meeting considered the proposals in depth in the light of the evaluation criteria approved by the cabinet and the evaluation done by the such committee that cleared three projects of 929 MW installed capacity as IPPs besides two rental plants of 436 MW capacity against a target of 1500 MW, authorised by the cabinet. The IPPs will come up on line before December 2009 and rental plants within next six to seven months and will submit it to ECC in next meeting for approval.