Pakistan's 'Zero Load-Shedding' Feeder List Grows, But the Grid's Real Scorecard Is Missing
HESCO has declared its 66th feeder exempt from load shedding, but without maintenance-spend and reliability data, the announcement obscures the gap between what ratepayers fund and what they get.
On June 29, the Hyderabad Electric Supply Company (HESCO) announced it had added an 11 KV feeder in Kori, Jamshoro district, to its list of feeders exempt from load shedding, bringing the total to 66.[1] The feeder serves 575 consumers through 36 pole-mounted transformers. The company framed the declaration as a step toward reliability.
But here is the question HESCO’s press release does not answer: what did the company spend on maintenance and upgrades for those 66 feeders versus what it collected from ratepayers? In monopoly utility systems worldwide, the gap between collected revenue and actual grid investment is the hidden story. In Pakistan, where distribution companies like HESCO report to the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA), the dockets exist to track depreciation allowances, operation and maintenance budgets, and actual spending. Without that audit, a “zero load-shedding” label is a promise, not a performance metric.
Compare the approach to performance-based regulation models used elsewhere. In Britain, Ofgem’s RIIO framework ties revenue to output targets, including reliability. In Hawaii, the 2020 framework links utility earnings to SAIDI and SAIFI targets. HESCO’s announcement has no penalty for failing to maintain the feeder’s status, no prudence review if the equipment fails, and no public reliability data, such as outage minutes per customer, to verify the claim. The IEEE 1366 standard for major event days, which separates routine performance from catastrophic failures, is absent from the narrative.
The alternative is straightforward: require HESCO and all Pakistani distribution companies to publish audited reliability metrics (SAIDI, SAIFI, CAIDI) alongside their capital expenditure and dividend data for the preceding five years. NEPRA should mandate a performance incentive mechanism that puts revenue at risk if declared “exempt” feeders suffer outages. Until then, each new feeder on the list is a headline, not a fix.