KARACHI: Former provincial minister and Chairman of National Business Group of FPCCI, Mian Zahid Hussain has said the suspension of natural gas to captive plants will hit production, exports, investments and jobs.
Mian Zahid Hussain further said the decision to shut down captive power plants will also hit revenue, tax targets and foreign exchange reserves.
The decision to link factories having captive power plants to the national grid should be reconsidered as the feeble power infrastructure is unable to provide continuous electricity, he added.
Talking to the business community, the veteran business leader said that suspension of gas supply to industries will not improve the situation in the country but it will leave three hundred thousand workers in the textile sector which other sectors will also suffer.
The supply chain supporting the export sector will also be shattered creating more problems for the industrial sector, he said.
The decision has been taken at a time when the export industry has bagged unprecedented orders and billions have been invested in capacity building and expansion which is being wasted, he noted.
Mian Zahid Hussain said that the production, transmission and distribution system of the power sector is highly inefficient which is wasting twenty percent of the product resulting in a circular dent amounting to almost Rs2.5 trillion.
Power outages and disruption are damaging machineries adding to repaid costs and putting timely completion of export orders at stake, he said, adding that the export sector should establish their own terminal and start importing LNG to find some relief.
A move to enhance power consumption from the national grid facing a capacity trap, the Cabinet Committee on Energy (CCoE) on Thursday had decided to ban fresh gas connections and disconnect supplies for captive power plants (CPPs) to existing industrial consumers.
The decision is based on the fact that cheaper domestic gas supplies were declining and their consumption in inefficient CPPs of industrial consumers was a big national loss.
