By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s state utility has restored a hydropower station in the volatile tribal belt of South Waziristan to its full generating capacity after nearly a decade of running at half power, officials said on Thursday, in a rare infrastructure win for a region long troubled by militancy and neglect.
The Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) reconnected the Gomal Zam Hydropower Station to the national grid on June 25, completing a rehabilitation project launched in April at a cost of 359.5 million rupees ($1.3 million) that was finished within 80 days, ahead of schedule.
The station’s two generating units — each rated at 8.7 megawatts — were knocked out of service in October 2016 when a technical fault disabled the reverse power protection relay. Wapda managed to restore one unit using in-house expertise in June 2018, but the second proved beyond its engineers’ means to fix without external help. The station limped along at half its installed capacity of 17.4 MW for the years that followed.
Security conditions in the area were the primary obstacle, hampering restoration for roughly ten years. South Waziristan, a mountainous former stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban along the Afghan border, saw sustained military operations for much of that period, making contractor access to the remote site all but impossible.
The rehabilitation contract was awarded to a joint venture and work began on April 5, 2026, with the unit recommissioned on June 25. Wapda said all mandatory technical, operational and safety tests had been completed before the unit was synchronised with the grid.
The station is connected to the national grid through a 132-kilovolt South Waziristan–Tank transmission line and has an annual generation capacity of around 90.9 million units of electricity. Officials said the restored output would improve power supply to South Waziristan, Tank, Dera Ismail Khan and other remote districts in southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa — areas where electricity access has historically been patchy.
The project is part of a broader push by Islamabad to reduce the country’s reliance on imported fuel and expand its renewable energy base. Pakistan has grappled for years with a chronic power crisis marked by expensive thermal generation, heavy fuel import bills and circular debt that has strained the public finances.
The Gomal Zam Dam, on which the power station sits, is a roller-compacted concrete gravity dam on the Gomal River, standing 133 metres high with a gross storage capacity of 1.14 million acre-feet. Construction began in 2001 but was plagued by militant attacks, kidnappings and financial difficulties. Two Chinese engineers were abducted in 2004, one of whom was killed, forcing a halt to work that was not resumed until 2007 under military-supervised contracting arrangements.
The powerhouse was completed in March 2013 and electricity production began in August of that year. When fully operational, the dam’s canal system can bring 191,000 acres of land under irrigation across Tank and Dera Ismail Khan districts.
Energy analysts said the restoration, while modest in absolute terms — 17.4 MW is a fraction of Pakistan’s roughly 49,000 MW installed base — carried significance beyond the raw numbers, demonstrating that infrastructure could be rehabilitated in areas once considered inaccessible because of security conditions.
Wapda said the station would also contribute to reducing Pakistan’s dependence on imported fuels by displacing thermal generation with clean hydropower, a priority the government has set as part of its commitment to raise the share of renewables in the national electricity mix.
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