Category: Recent Post

The 1,100MW K2 reactor at the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant (Kanupp), the first unit using China’s homegrown ‘Hualong One’ technology, has successfully completed its thermal testing also known as hot functional tests (HTFs). China is building two Hualong One reactors with a capacity of 1,100MW each at the Karachi Nuclear Power Complex on the coast of the metropolis where a single 137MW reactor unit (Kanupp-1) has been operating since 1972. The construction of the Kanupp-2 and Kanupp-3 reactor units started in August 2015 and May 2016, with the start of…

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MULTAN: Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Hussain Qureshi has said the process for revision of power tariff agreements with independent power producers (IPPs) is in its final stages and would facilitate the people once it is completed. “The agreements are almost in final stages and their fruit would be shifted to masses soon,” Qureshi said on Sunday while addressing ground-breaking of 132KV grid station at Multan’s Fatima Jinnah Town. “The incumbent government engaged the IPPs for revising the electricity tariff. When there will be low tariff, the electricity bills will reduce…

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ISLAMABAD: The Khyber-Pakhtun­khwa government is seeking World Bank assistance for the development of 88MW run-of-river hydropower project on the Gabral tributary of the Swat river to generate about 339 gigawatt hours of electricity annually. The World Bank is currently evaluating the project which will be located near the Kalam town in Swat district. The proposed project involves construction of 21-meter high riverbed and 100 meter wide weir with spillways, under sluices, fish ladder, outlet structures and sand trap, according to the project document. The project will be run-of-river, with a…

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ISLAMABAD: The government-owned National Transmission & Despatch Company (NTDC) has challenged certain directives of the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra), saying these will limit the scope of bidding for lowest tariff and lead the country towards another ‘capacity trap’. The “NTDC believes that while considering these directions, size of committed set of projects would further increase and thus ‘least cost principle’ of the Indicative Generation Capacity Expansion Plan (IGCEP 2020-47) would be adversely affected”. The Power Division’s NTDC, which is also the power system operator, put on record that…

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Pakistan risks locking itself into building more power capacity than it needs as a result of over-optimistic energy demand growth forecasts that do not take into account the impact of Covid-19, according to a new IEEFA report. Pakistan’s state-owned National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC) published its latest long-term power plan – the Indicative Generation Capacity Expansion Plan (IGCEP) 2047 – in April 2020. The policy document fails to live up to the government’s stated principles of sustainability and affordability, IEEFA report author Simon Nicholas, energy finance analyst at the Institute…

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