Karachi is going through one of its worst stretches of power outages in recent months, with residents in several neighbourhoods reporting cuts of 16 to 18 hours a day. The timing makes the situation harder to explain. Barely six weeks ago, the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) declared K-Electric’s loss-based load shedding illegal and ordered the utility to stop unannounced and excessive power cuts. The question many Karachiites are now asking is how those two facts can sit side by side.

The scale of the disruption is considerable. Business Recorder reported that outages of up to 18 hours were adding to public misery, with households running out of water, sleepless nights and disruptions to cellular connectivity. Minute Mirror reported that K-Electric has acknowledged carrying out load shedding on 630 of its 2,121 feeders, while residents in some areas say they get electricity for only four to six hours in a 24-hour period. One Surjani Town resident alleged a full day without power before supply returned for just four hours. K-Electric has said that outages in areas including Airport, Azizabad, Baldia, North Karachi and Surjani are lasting up to 12 hours.

K-Electric’s explanation has two parts. The first is a gas problem. On October 9, spokesperson Imran Rana said a nationwide shortage of re-gasified liquefied natural gas (RLNG), caused by international supply disruptions and delayed cargoes, was affecting generation across the country, including in Karachi. The utility said it might need to undertake load management as an extreme, last-resort measure during evening and night peak hours, and that daytime supply would remain largely stable. It said it was coordinating with Pakistan LNG Limited and apologised for the inconvenience. The shortage is not new to the country. Earlier this year, RLNG unavailability forced utilities to carry out load management nationwide, and in August the government apologised to consumers and promised to reduce load shedding once delayed cargoes arrived.

The second part of the explanation is about losses. K-Electric has maintained that load shedding is carried out in areas affected by electricity theft and non-payment of bills. On October 10, ARY News reported that the utility had launched additional night-time outages of two to three hours in areas with alleged power theft and system losses, including New Karachi, Manghopir, Lyari, Orangi Town, Korangi and Gadap. On the same day, load shedding began in areas that had previously been exempt, including Saddar, Clifton, DHA and Korangi, with one-hour phased cuts that in several localities stretched beyond two hours.

This is where the regulator’s order matters. On September 1, NEPRA again declared load shedding based on aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses illegal and directed K-Electric to immediately stop unannounced, unscheduled and excessive outages. Its inquiry found that the utility had been enforcing what it called a self-styled AT&C losses policy, that K-Electric routinely exceeded its own declared schedules, and that scheduled load shedding was effectively being used as a baseline with extra unannounced hours imposed on top. According to NEPRA’s findings, average outages on high-loss feeders reached 10 hours and 39 minutes, with 81.9 per cent of those feeders exceeding the 10-hour limit, while 68.4 per cent of medium-loss feeders breached their six-hour limit.

The regulator’s directions were specific. K-Electric was told to stop cutting power to entire feeders because of high losses, to protect consumers who pay their bills regularly, to disconnect individual connections involved in theft instead, to install aerial bundled cables to reduce losses, and to prepare a phased, time-bound plan for reducing them. ARY’s report on the decision added that, despite having been fined, K-Electric had not changed its operational procedures. At the time, K-Electric said it remained engaged with the regulator on the matter.

Seen together, the sequence leaves a gap that needs explaining. The RLNG shortage is a generation problem, and NEPRA’s order does not directly address it. If the current outages were purely the result of a gas shortage, they would be expected to be shared across the system in announced, predictable blocks. But K-Electric’s own description of load shedding in theft-affected areas, together with the number of feeders involved and the reports of outages well beyond normal schedules, suggests that loss-based shutdowns have not stopped. It is not clear from public statements how much of the current load shedding falls into which category, and residents have no way of telling the difference. Whether the utility is complying with the regulator’s order is a question for NEPRA and K-Electric to answer openly, ideally with feeder-wise data.

For residents, the distinction matters less than the experience. Karachi’s water supply depends on electric pumping, so long outages quickly become water shortages. Mobile towers lose backup power, workers lose sleep, and small businesses lose a working day. Political parties have already weighed in, with the MQM-P earlier accusing K-Electric of causing severe hardship through load shedding of up to 14 hours in some areas.

Several answers are still outstanding. When will the delayed RLNG cargoes arrive and normal generation resume? Will K-Electric publish a clear, feeder-wise schedule so that consumers know what to expect and regulators can check it? And will NEPRA take further action if its September order is not being followed? Until those questions are answered, Karachi will keep living with outages whose cause, depending on who is asked, is either a global gas shortage or a long-running dispute over losses.

Compiled by the Weekly PK City Desk.