IT is heartening to hear the prime minister inform the country that Pakistan is now surplus in power-generation capacity.

The only task left to carry out now, it would appear, is to find a way to end the load-shedding that persists despite this surplus of power. It is worth remembering that when the power crisis was first seen in its full dimensions, roughly in the years af ter 2006 when the first accumulation of the circular debt made its appearance on the balance sheets of listed independent power producers, there was also a surplus in power-generation capacity. In the years that followed, as load-shedding spread across the country prompting power riots in many cities, much of the generation capacity was sitting idle for want of payments. Even back then, the crisis was not caused by a lack of power supply as much as by the inability to pay for the generation capacity in the system due to a paucity of fiscal resources. Those years are now behind us partially due to a reduction in oil prices and a rollback of the subsidies that had been hampering government finances. Having passed the higher costs on to the consumer, the government managed to lighten its load somewhat. A marginal improvement in billing and recoveries was seen from 2014 onward, but much of this also owed itself to the new policy of recovery-based load-shedding, not so much to the reform of the billing and recovery machinery of the distribution companies.

Today, one more time we can claim that we are in surplus, yet load-shedding in some parts persists. The question remains the same: can we afford to run the system at full capacity? The enhanced megawatts added to the system are real, but we will know whether they will solve our power crisis once they are activated in earnest and the full costs of the generation start to come in. This will happen as the summer months approach, or perhaps the winter months will present their own challenge since hydel generation usually plummets at this time of the year and the entire power needs of the country are met through thermal generation. The government has indeed executed its projects with vigour and succeeded in diversifying the fuel mix away from expensive furnace oil. But whether this is enough to overcome the persistent power crisis that began in 2006 remains to be seen.