KE admits it experienced ‘cyber incident’, customers may experience disruption

Karachi’s largest electric utility provider K-Electric has said that it experienced an attempted cyber-incident earlier this week. The power company in a statement said all critical customer services including bill payment solutions and 118 call-centre are operational and fully functional, to ensure the integrity of our systems, as a precautionary measure, we have isolated few non-critical services. As such customers may experience some disruption in accessing duplicate bills from the KE website. As an alternate, duplicate bills may be availed from the nearest K-Electric Customer Care Centre. “The KE teams…

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IMF wants Pakistan to up power, gas tariffs

ISLAMABAD: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has again turned up the pressure on Pakistan, asking it to increase power and gas tariffs for the revival of the stalled $6 billion programme. The global lender has contacted Pakistani authorities to convey its demands, sources said on Thursday. The sources added that the IMF had called for measures to reduce circular debt and power losses. The IMF has also demanded that the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra) and the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (Ogra) should be allowed to make independent…

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Exemption from guaranteed LNG sought

ISLAMABAD: The Power Division is seeking exemption from guaranteed liquefied natural gas (LNG) offtake for three power plants, a move that may aggravate woes of LNG suppliers and hurt gas imports from Qatar. Since Pakistan started importing LNG from Qatar in 2015, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) has been facing criticism from different quarters for striking a long-term LNG deal at high rates, which resulted in lower consumption of the fuel in the power sector. LNG-based power plants were set up during the 2013-18 tenure of PML-N government with higher efficiency…

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Old power plants to be phased out

ISLAMABAD: The government on Thursday decided in principle to close down about 2,900 megawatts of government-owned old power plants in two phases and get rid of ‘must-run’ status of three LNG-based plants in Punjab of about 3,900MW. Under the decision, various units of about 1,400MW at four generation companies of ex-Wapda would be closed down immediately, followed by another 1,500MW of units by the year 2022. These issues came up for discussion at a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Energy (CCoE) presided over by Minister for Planning and Development…

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Govt for speedy setting up of LNG terminals

ISLAMABAD: The federal cabinet on Wednesday directed the petroleum and defence ministries to remove all hurdles within 30 days to facilitate setting up and operationalisation of two additional liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing terminals in the private sector. Under the decision taken at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, the prime minister approved two proposals of the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and ordered immediate implementation. Special Assistant on Pet­ro­leum Nadeem Babar confirmed that the cabinet removed all obstacles. He said the two additional terminals required a total of 16 approvals and…

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