Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) has notified of further hours of load shedding beginning from Sunday.
From now onwards, each customer will face 17 hours of power shortage every week. Till now, they only suffered from three and a half hours of such power outage.

According to NEA, the load shedding has been expanded to cover morning as well as afternoon hours.

When asked about the extension of the load shedding hours, an official at the Load Dispatching Centre (LDC) of the NEA said that they were compelled to take such steps due to power shortage. He however did not elaborate.

The agreement reached between India and Nepal for the power purchase is yet to come into effect in absence of infrastructure for it.

This is the first time the country will be facing load-shedding since the 144 megawatt Kali Gandaki ‘A’ became fully operational in 2002.

NEA said that it is able to produce only 470 megawatts from the total capacity of 540 megawatts from various power projects, whereas the country’s demand in the winter season is over 600 megawatts

The country is already importing nearly 80 megawatts from India via Kalaiya in the east and Tanakpur in the west.