The electricity system, which was affected due to a major breakdown, would be restored by 10pm tonight in phases, Power Minister Khurram Dastgir has said.

The major power breakdown has disrupted life across the country since early morning. Cellular phone networks went down after battery backups were drained and generators at towers ran out of fuel. Water supply was also disrupted in Karachi and other cities.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has formed a committee to probe the outage.

“Technical teams of the National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC) and other experts are busy rectifying the fault, which occurred in the North-South system at 7:34am today,” Dastagir told a press conference Monday afternoon.

The minister added the transmission system tripped due to unusual fluctuation in the voltage of the national grid.

“The entire transmission system was safe and there was no disruption in it despite the power breakdown. A power plant located in the Uch area is running and power supply to some areas of Balochistan and Southern Punjab has been restored,” he said.

He added that partial power supply to Karachi has also been restored through Thar Coal Power plants and he was “personally” supervising the restoration operation from National Power Control Centre.

The NTDC had been given the authority to switch on any power plant needed for meeting the electricity needs, Dastgir said, adding that the Prime Minister has also ordered an inquiry and a three-member committee has been set up to probe the incident.

“Restoration of electricity is a challenge as power needs to switch on each power plant.”

Earlier, Dastagir told Reuters the outage was caused by a large voltage surge in the south of the grid, which affected the entire network. Supplies were being partially restored from north to the south, he added, nearly six hours after factories, hospitals and schools reported outages.

The grid should be fully functioning by 10 pm time (1700 GMT), Dastagir said, adding: “We are trying our utmost to achieve restoration before that.”

The decrease in the frequency of the national grid has caused a major breakdown in many cities of Pakistan, leaving them without electricity on Monday.

“We are restoring electricity from north to south,” Dastgir said in a tweet earlier.

He added that electricity was restored partially in distribution companies Islamabad, Peshawar, Quetta, Multan, and Sukkur.

The system frequency of the national grid went down at 7:34am this morning, causing a widespread breakdown in the power system, the energy minister said in a tweet, more than an hour after the news broke out.

The restoration of grid stations has been started from Warsak, Balochistan, it said. The ministry claimed that in the last hour limited number of grids of the Islamabad Supply Company (IESCO) and the Peshawar Supply Company have been restored.

Dastgir claimed that each and every megawatt was checked during the power generation in order to check its impact on the power tariff. “Just because the electricity demand is less during winters, most of the systems are shut down at night and the next morning they are opened one by one,” he further explained.

Sources told Aaj News that breakdown occurred after a technical fault was reported in the transmission line from Guddu to Quetta, leading to the reduction of the power frequency from the optimum level.

It resulted in the cascading failure, which is initiated by a set of equipment outages that cause operating constraint violations. It can be triggered by naturally occurring events, such as a wind storm, or human intervention, said a working paper published by the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center.

Power plants trip after the cascading failure. Sources said that Sindh, Punjab, and Islamabad regions were affected by the breakdown. They were of the view that complete restoration of electricity might take time.

This is the second such incident reported over the past three months in the country dealing with the energy crisis and high energy costs.

Dastagir claimed that the restoration of grid stations in Peshawar and Islamabad had begun. “I can assure you that power will be fully restored across the country within the next 12 hours,” he added.

On Karachi, the minister said: “We provide K-Electric about 1,000 to 1,100 megawatts routinely. Power in the city will be restored within a few hours.”

Islamabad

IESCO, which provides electricity to the federal capital, Rawalpindi, Attock, Jhelum, Chakwal and parts of AJK, said that the power supply to as many as 117 grid stations of its company has been suspended.

“No clear reason has yet been given by the Region Control Center,” it said in a tweet.

In the garrison city of Rawalpindi, neighbouring Islamabad, most shops were struggling without power.

Homeware trader Muhammad Iftikhar Sheikh, 71, said he was unable to demonstrate electronic products to browsing customers.

“The customers never buy without testing first,” he said. “All of us are sitting idle.”

Lahore

Lahore was reported to be out of electricity at around 7:25am. The Orange Line train was also shut down, making it difficult for people to reach offices.

Karachi

Around 90% of Pakistan’s economic hub was reported to be hit by the breakdown, sources said. There was no electricity in Bahadurabad, Gulshan-e-Iqbal, Gulistan-e-Johar, Gurumandir, DHA, Saddar, Jamshed Town, Clifton, Nazimabad, North Nazimabad, Safoora, Gulshan-e-Maymar, and many areas, according to updates by 10am.

“There are reports of multiple outages from different parts of the city. We are investigating the issue and will keep this space posted,” K-Electric spokesperson Imran Rana said in a Twitter thread.

“We hardly managed to come to school as there was no electricity at home,” 25-year-old Karachi teacher Vareesha Nadeem told AFP.

“Here in classes we are using battery-powered lights but they’ll run out soon. Power outages have just become a part of our lives as they happen so often.”

A shop owner in the megacity told AFP he feared his entire dairy stock would spoil without refrigeration, and 39-year-old printer Khurrum Khan said orders were piling up because of the blackout.

Unreliable power is “a permanent curse which our governments have failed to overcome,” Khan complained.

Quetta

At least 22 districts of Balochistan were affected by the failure in electricity supply, the Quetta Electricity Supply Company officials said. They were finding details about the technical fault.

They added three transmission lines – 220kV Uch-Sibi, 220kV Dadu-Khuzdar, and 220 kV Dera Murad Jamali – had tripped. The National Transmission and Despatch Company was making efforts for the restoration of electricity, officials said.

Peshawar

The three major infirmaries in Peshawar, Khyber Teaching Hospital, Lady Reading Hospital, and Hayatabad Medical Complex, were running on generators after the disruption of electricity service, spokespersons said.

With input from APP, Reuters and AFP

Kamran Ali from Peshawar and Sohail Ahmed Qasi from Quetta also contributed to the story.

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