Daily Times

Sir: Alongside the concerted efforts being made in a committed manner by the federal government to overcome and eliminate lingering menace of electricity load shedding, the Punjab government is also making its valuable positive contributions in this regarding by establishing new gas, coal and solar energy power plants in different parts of the province.

It is good to note that these efforts of PML(N)’s federal and provincial governments are gradually yielding fruit as more and more power is being added to the national grid.

Only recently, Sahiwal Coal-fired power plant had become functional and contributing 1320 megawatt of power to the national grid. The provincial government is also planning to set up a 1200 megawatt gas fired power plant in southern Punjab region.

Another gas fired power plant is being established at Haveli Bahadur Shah in Jhang which on becoming fully functional in due course of time at a cost of Rs 90 billion will generate 1230 megawatt of power.

It has started trial production and will be generating 750 megawatt of power within next few days. This good and commendable news was given by Chief Minister Shehbaz Sharif to the media people when he visited and inspected progress on the construction of the power plant the other day.

According to the reports in the newspapers, the chief minister said that under leadership of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, unprecedented development has been made in energy production to end the lingering darkness during last four years which was unparalleled in 70 years history of the country and development projects are being launched and completed in record time with speed and transparency. The chief minister also paid tributes to the foreign and local experts working on the project in hot and humid weather.

With gas power plant at Jhang fully becoming functional in less than a week from now and Sahiwal power plant already operational, both the coal and gas fired plants will be quite appreciably adding substantial 2550 megawatts of power thus making positive contribution towards overcoming prevailing power shortage.

All this surely augurs well and hopefully if all goes well the lingering menace of electricity load shedding will almost be fully eliminated in the coming months from the province as well as the country on the whole with completion of more and more power plants.

MEEM ZAY RIFAT

Lahore

Published in Daily Times, June 25th, 2017.