Residents across Lahore and its neighbouring districts should prepare for long planned power cuts from today, as the Lahore Electric Supply Company begins a major round of maintenance and upgrade work ahead of the winter season. The programme, which starts on Monday, will see electricity switched off for hours at a time in around 200 urban and rural subdivisions, in what the company describes as essential work to keep the network reliable through the colder months.
According to the schedule released by the company, most affected areas will be without power for between five and seven hours a day, while some neighbourhoods could face interruptions of up to eight hours. The outages will generally fall between nine in the morning and four in the afternoon, the window in which maintenance crews can work safely on live parts of the network. Households and businesses in the affected areas will therefore need to plan their days around the daytime shutdowns, particularly where work, study or medical equipment depends on a steady supply.
The work itself covers a wide stretch of the distribution system. Engineers will be attending to high-voltage grid stations operating at 132 and 220 kilovolts, along with the 11-kilovolt feeders that carry power from those stations into local areas. Worn conductors and insulators will be replaced, branches growing close to high-voltage lines will be cut back, grid stations will be overhauled, and some feeders will be split so that seasonal demand can be managed more evenly. It is the kind of unglamorous work that rarely makes headlines but determines whether the lights stay on when demand rises.
In Lahore itself, the shutdowns touch some of the city’s busiest residential areas, including Allama Iqbal Town, Gulshan-e-Ravi, Shadman, Johar Town, Model Town, Defence, Cantt and Walton Road. Industrial and commercial pockets around Raiwind, Manga Mandi, Sundar and Jubilee Town are also on the list, which means factories and workshops will have to adjust their shifts. Beyond the city, the schedule reaches into Sheikhupura, including Qila Sattar Shah and Atta Abad, as well as Kasur, Okara, Muridke, Farooqabad, Hujra Shah Muqeem and Phool Nagar, so the disruption will be felt well beyond Lahore’s boundaries.
There is, however, a note of caution hanging over the programme. Sources within the company have said that some field offices have been slow to receive the maintenance equipment and replacement parts they need, raising the possibility that some work could overrun and restoration could take longer than planned. That will be little comfort to anyone already facing a seven-hour outage, and it puts pressure on the company to keep to its published timetable and to communicate promptly if a shutdown is extended.
For now, the practical advice for people in the affected areas is straightforward: charge phones, laptops and other essential devices before the morning cut, keep torches and backup lighting ready, and make arrangements for anything that cannot wait until the afternoon. Planned maintenance is never welcome, but it is far preferable to an unexpected breakdown in the middle of winter, and if this round of work is completed on schedule, Lahore’s power network should come out of it in better shape for the season ahead.
