There is a particular kind of grief reserved for self-inflicted wounds, and Pakistan's power sector deserves that grief more than almost any other sector of its economy. This is not the story of a country brought low by war, sanctions, or an act of God. It is the story of a country that built its own crisis, brick by brick, contract by contract, applauded at every step by the very men who now appear on evening talk shows lamenting the state of “governance.” The engine of Pakistan's economy — electricity — was not sabotaged by an external enemy. It was sabotaged by the architects who once pitched imported coal and LNG-fired power plants as the miracle that would end load-shedding forever, and who now, having gotten what they asked for, mourn the wreckage on camera as if they were bystanders to it.
The numbers, drawn from Pakistan's own regulator, tell a story too plain to be spun. According to data compiled by the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA), Pakistan's local coal-based installed capacity stands at roughly 2,436 MW, dwarfed by an imported-coal fleet of nearly 4,971 MW plants at Sahiwal, Port Qasim, and Hub that were fast-tracked under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor as the answer to chronic blackouts. These plants were built on Power Purchase Agreements structured as “take-or-pay”: the government promised to pay for their capacity whether or not the electricity was ever dispatched. The reference plant factor written into those contracts assumed availability above 80 percent, a leap from the roughly 60 percent that had long been standard for the country's older IPP fleet. It was an extraordinary promise. It has produced an extraordinary betrayal.
Independent analyses, including work by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, now put actual utilisation at several of these imported-coal plants below 20 percent, with NEPRA's own reporting placing the range for the fleet between roughly 20 and 26 percent in recent periods. The plants sit largely idle undercut by cheaper hydel and local generation, sidelined by falling industrial demand and rising rooftop solar while the government remains legally bound to pay their full capacity charges regardless. NEPRA's most recent State of the Industry report found that consumers were burdened with Rs 1.81 trillion in capacity payments in a single fiscal year, much of it flowing to plants doing almost nothing. This is not a technical footnote. This is the mechanical heart of Pakistan's circular debt, ticking louder with every unit of electricity these plants fail to generate.
And then the second blow lands, because Pakistan tied its fate not only to imported coal but to imported gas. When Qatar Energy declared force majeure on its long-term LNG contracts amid the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Pakistan which had built an entire generation strategy around cheap, dependable Qatari cargoes was left scrambling in the spot market, paying as much as $21.88 per MMBtu for emergency supply. The result, confirmed by NEPRA's own fuel-cost data, was that RLNG-based generation costs rocketed from under Rs 14 per unit in April to a record Rs 47.4 per unit in July, part of a 38 percent surge in overall power generation costs that month compared to a year earlier. A country that once had so much LNG it was diverting cargoes it could not use found itself, within a single year, unable to keep the lights on without begging the spot market for relief. That is not misfortune. That is a monument to planning that never accounted for the fragility of what it depended on.
Consumers are unable to pay bills inflated not by their own consumption but by contracts signed on their behalf without their consent have taken their own lives. These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are documented tragedies.
It is worth asking NEPRA and the Minister of Power, plainly and without theatre: why were these Power Purchase Agreements signed with reference plant factors so divorced from Pakistan's actual demand trajectory? Why was a fleet built to run above 80 percent allowed to settle into the low twenties, or lower, while consumers kept paying as if it were running at full tilt? And why, four years after the first warnings from Pakistan's own energy economists, has no serious renegotiation or early-retirement plan for the least-utilised imported coal assets been executed at scale?
The human cost of these decisions is not abstract. Industry, squeezed by some of the highest per-unit power costs in the region, has shed jobs it may never restore, and the youth left behind by that contraction have become, in the words of security analysts who study the recruitment pipelines of the Baloch Liberation Army and the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, an increasingly available pool for extremist mobilisation. And in homes across Punjab and Sindh, ordinary consumers unable to pay bills inflated not by their own consumption but by contracts signed on their behalf without their consent have taken their own lives. These are not rhetorical flourishes. They are documented tragedies, reported one by one in the country's own newspapers, each one a small, devastating footnote to a policy failure written in megawatts and rupees.
When Pakistan's Interior Minister stood before the country's economic leadership this summer and declared that the governance system had “collapsed,” and the military's own spokesman, while distancing the institution from the remark, nonetheless affirmed that governance failures sit at the root of the state's mounting challenges, they were both, in their own ways, right but neither named the mechanism. The mechanism is here, in the fuel mix, in the capacity payments, in the force majeure notices from Doha. Governance did not collapse in the abstract. It collapsed in the specific, calculable, auditable decision to build an electricity system on promises the country could not keep and fuel it could not secure.
This is not a partisan argument, and no amount of rhetorical cover from a fiction writer, a preacher, or a prophet could make the arithmetic say otherwise. The math is the math. But if the diagnosis is bleak, the prognosis need not be. Reform proposals exist including a master plan pitched to the Ministry of Planning months ago by an engineer who has spent a career on exactly this problem, still working its way through consultation. Whether Pakistan acts on plans like it, or continues to let the architects of this collapse narrate its post-mortem on television, will determine whether the fifth most populous nation on earth, and a nuclear power besides, spends the next decade generating electricity or merely generating excuses.