Power consumers to face Rs25bn extra fuel cost in October bills

The government is set to charge electricity consumers an extra Rs25 billion for fuel costs in October bills. The National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra) has decided to review an incremental tariff package for industry introduced last December, Dawn reported.

At a public hearing, a power purchasing agency official said an extra fuel cost of Rs1.73 per unit in August was mainly due to expensive imported liquefied natural gas and coal. This was compounded by lower-than-expected output from cheaper hydropower and nuclear plants.

The official said hydropower provided 38% of generation instead of a targeted 41%, while nuclear power fell to 10% from an estimated 16.4% due to an outage at the Karachi plant. Consequently, the share of imported coal-based generation more than doubled to 15.6%.