Pakistan: Sindh CM operates excavator to break ground for project to get more power for Karachi

Karachi: Sindh Chief Minister, Syed Murad Ali Shah, who is a qualified civil engineer by profession, has operated an excavator to break ground for building energy infrastructure to further augment the connectivity of Karachi with the national grid for energising more homes and industries in the provincial capital.

Syed Murad Ali Shah was the chief guest at the groundbreaking of the 500KV interchange grid of Karachi Electric (K-Electric), the privatised power utility of the provincial capital, near Hawke’s Bay beach of the city for further strengthening K-Electric’s connectivity with the national grid.

Shah expressed pleasure that the new grid would bring an additional 500MWs to 1,000 MWs of electricity from the national grid benefiting almost 3,000 customers of Karachi.

He said that the new grid would become operational by April 2024.

He appreciated the fact that K-Electric’s parent organisation, the Karachi Electric Supply Corporation, came into existence as early as 1913 when many cities in the United States didn’t have proper systems for distributing electricity.

He said that his government had been providing the utmost assistance to the K-Electric to help it fulfill its basic responsibilities of ensuring uninterrupted electric supply to the people of Karachi at the most affordable rates.

The CM said the 100MWs Nooriabad power plant built by the Sindh government under a public-private partnership arrangement was one of the prime examples of this cooperation as the energy production unit had emerged as one of the cheapest and most reliable sources of electricity available to K-Electric.

He mentioned that the provincial government had spent its own resources to build the transmission infrastructure for supplying electricity from the Nooriabad power plant to Karachi.

“I am proud of the fact that one of the main achievements of my government in the energy sector, the Nooriabad power plant, is being fully utilised to serve the people of Karachi in the best possible manner,” he added.

He said the Sindh government had the resolve to further enhance its cooperation with the K-Electric so that cheap and clean electricity produced through the indigenously available power sources of solar and wind would be available to the consumers in Karachi as early as possible.

The CM said that Sindh with vast coal reserves in Thar, many operational natural gas fields, and abundantly available alternative means of energy in the form of solar and wind power, alone had the potential to make Pakistan self-sufficient in the energy sector.