Doubling Down on Reliability: Karachi’s Engineered Smart Grid Breakthrough

Faced with soaring demand and limited visibility into upstream grid assets, Karachi-based K-Electric engineered an in-house special protection system that delivers more than 600 MW of secure power imports to Pakistan’s largest city—without new infrastructure, capital outlays, or delay.

Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and economic powerhouse, has grown to 20.3 million, according to the Census 2023. For K-Electric (KE), the city’s primary energy provider—including all its residential, commercial, industrial, and agricultural consumers—that growth offers not only tremendous opportunity, but also immense pressure.

Over the past five years, average peak demand has risen—driven by surging temperatures, urban expansion, industrialization, and a policy-backed shift away from fragmented captive generation toward centralized grid supply. While solarization has impacted grid demand, KE has rapidly onboarded new industrial consumers, processed dozens of load extension requests, and worked to reinforce key 132-kV corridors across its grid. At the same time, it is grappling with increasing system complexity, characterized by new intermittency and load-generation dynamics. Moreover, the explosive population growth has tested the physical limits of its infrastructure, despite targeted investments to enhance capacity and reliability.

1. Captured from 261 miles above the Arabian Sea by the International Space Station on Jan. 9, 2021, this image shows Karachi—Pakistan’s largest city—glowing at night. Now home to more than 20.3 million residents, the city’s explosive growth and rising power demand pushed K-Electric to engineer a novel grid-side solution that doubled power imports without new transmission lines. Source: NASA

Formally established in 1913 and privatized in 2005, K-Electric today operates one of South Asia’s most expansive urban power systems, spanning 6,500 square kilometers across Karachi and adjoining regions. Its infrastructure includes 78 grid stations and nearly 1,400 kilometers of high-voltage transmission lines, serving 3.8 million customers. Since 2009, the utility has reinvested more than $4.6 billion into generation, transmission, and distribution upgrades—enhancing its owned generation capacity by more than 1,500 MW and more than doubling its transmission and distribution capacity—all while working to reduce transmission and distribution losses from 35.9% to 15.99%.

Fully cognizant of its pivotal role in ensuring the city’s economic and infrastructural development by providing reliable, affordable, and sustainable power, the utility is continually pushing for power optimization and operational excellence. The project has been led by Ali Imran Hussain and Faisal Mairaj, leads of KE’s Network Control, who told POWER that a parallel and increasingly nonnegotiable undertaking is to leverage ingenuity—solutions that allow the grid to operate faster, leaner, and smarter.

In 2020, with few options for major new infrastructure and no margin for error, KE implemented a homegrown breakthrough—an automation-driven special protection system known as the Cross Trip Scheme—that is highly worthy of POWER’s 2025 Smart Grid Award.

“Designed, tested, and deployed entirely in-house, the project allowed K-Electric to safely enhance the protection and control scheme to enable transformers and lines to be utilized at par, while saving on capital expenditure,” said Abbas Husain, Chief Generation and Transmission Officer. “In a grid environment, where reliability hinges on costly infrastructure and long timelines, KE’s software-driven solution delivered flexibility and resilience with precision—all in a span of nine months.”

Pushing Past the 600-MW Barrier

The solution emerged out of operational and economic needs. “There was surplus power available in the country upstream,” Hussain, KE’s head of Transmission Operations, recalled. “We were keen because this enabled us to help the national grid address some of the underutilisation and the capacity charges issues. So there was a challenge: how to draw more power from the existing interconnection without compromising the technical limits, the reliability of the network, or the safety and security of the interconnection itself.”

At the time, KE’s import limit from the national grid stood at roughly 600 MW, a ceiling imposed by protection thresholds, interconnection reliability concerns, and limited visibility into non-KE grid assets. KE needed to raise that ceiling to at least 1,000–1,100 MW. But a feasibility study, conducted in 2020 in collaboration with third-party consultants, ruled out conventional infrastructure options. New interconnections or expanded transformer capacity were too expensive, had extended project timelines, and too uncertain to meet the near-term need.

Instead, the study explored the technical viability of a special protection system based on “cross trip” logic—a digital control architecture that enables dynamic load rejection in response to real-time grid disturbances, safeguarding both KE’s internal network and upstream assets owned by the national grid operator. Simulations modeled worst-case scenarios—including the loss of auto-transformers and the tripping of high-voltage interconnections—and indicated that with the right adaptive logic, KE could substantially increase imports without breaching critical operational thresholds. Equally important, the approach required no new capital expenditure.

An Engineering Innovation

The system KE ultimately designed and implemented is, at its core, a tailored Special Protection System (SPS) engineered to deliver rapid, automated responses to grid disturbances. “The infrastructure consists of three layers,” explained Faisal Mairaj, head of Network Planning. “Firstly, the protective relays. Secondly, the communication equipment, which consists of Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH). And lastly, the SCADA—the logics developed on our KE system that alert the operator and guide actions in real time.”

The SPS operates on adaptive trip logic—a customized digital rule set that governs automatic load rejection based on transformer loading, breaker positions, and power flow direction across key interconnections. Relay panels continuously monitor these variables at critical grid nodes. When instability is detected—such as excessive loading or the tripping of upstream 500-kV lines—the system issues transfer trip signals to select substations, initiating staged disconnections of specific 132-kV feeders to maintain system integrity.

The KE experts noted that simulation models outlined cascading response stages: If current loading on key circuits exceeded the threshold for more than the desired duration, relays would trigger targeted load rejection, starting with non-critical 132-kV feeders serving industrial and commercial zones. More severe contingencies—such as the tripping of both 500-kV interconnections or complete upstream islanding—would initiate broader cutbacks, including power transformer circuits and even high-voltage 220-kV feeders. The thresholds are encoded into protection relays and tightly integrated with the SCADA system to allow real-time visibility and automated execution through KE’s centralized control interface.

However, one of the project’s most critical design constraints was that KE had to build this logic without access to live SCADA data from the upstream assets it depended on. “This is basically a remote station from which we import power, but it’s maintained and operated by another entity,” Mairaj explained. “If the problem is in our network, we can handle it. But if it’s on the other network and we don’t have the visibility, we cannot manage it.” To overcome this, KE engineered its system to infer grid conditions from circuit breaker status and transformer loading alone, allowing reliable, real-time action even in the absence of full data or direct control.

Implementation and Coordination

Given the urgency of the project, KE formed a special cross-functional task force spanning protection, control, telecom, and SCADA. “There was a complete roadmap with schematics and timelines—what had to be done, by whom, and by when,” Imran said. To accelerate deployment, KE repurposed its existing infrastructure and relied entirely on in-house labor to implement the scheme at substations. While internal alignment allowed for faster turnaround, the national grid operator’s involvement required ongoing coordination and consensus-building to validate the approach, he noted.

The project was fully implemented and commissioned by early 2021. A key benefit of the rapid rollout was KE’s ability to minimize procurement delays and costs, which benefitted from robust design. Investing more time in understanding the network, the risk, and outlining the logic in the design made for expedited execution—similar to a routine network upgrade.

However, its impact was immediate. The project unlocked more than 600 MW in additional grid imports—enough to offset increased capex and meet surging demand. And it has operated continuously since commissioning, already helping avert at least two major grid events.

“With the help of Almighty God, there haven’t been any scenarios where the project failed,” said Abbas Husain, Chief Generation and Transmission Officer. “No other solutions could have delivered that impact so quickly. You cannot have an interconnection of 600 MW in five to six months. You cannot add energized generation capacity in five to six months—that would take at least three years. But we enabled the city to have cheaper electricity. We ensured fossil plants did not burn. That’s not a small gain.”

Asked about lessons learned from the project, the experts urged peers to prioritize thoughtful design. They noted that human-made systems always have room for flaws, which is why investment in careful design must take precedence over implementation. Identifying and communicating risks is critical, as credibility is on the line. A robust design approach also supports strategic execution, enabling sustainable power import without high capital expenditure, they said.