LAHORE: As the sun rises and street lights turn off in Lahore, capital of Pakistan’s eastern Punjab province, Zubair Tufail, an electrical engineer also starts his daily work at a converter station of ±660 kilovolt Matiari-Lahore high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission project in a suburb of Lahore, where he works as team supervisor of operations.
A 26-year-old native of Lahore, Tufail joined the project after graduating from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore.
“Initially, we were just fresh engineers from the university and there was no other HVDC project in Pakistan, so we hardly knew about the technology. An experienced Chinese engineer was assigned to every Pakistani engineer on the project, who used to teach us the technology. So we can call them whenever there is a need,” Tufail said.
This was Pakistan’s first HVDC transmission project funded, constructed and operated by the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC) under the CPEC framework. The project was officially put into commercial operation in September 2021.
Launched in 2013, CPEC is a corridor linking the Gwadar port in southwestern Pakistan with Kashgar in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, which highlights energy, transport and industrial cooperation.
In 2015, the two sides signed more than 50 cooperation deals and agreed to centre the development of the CPEC with four key areas, namely, the Gwadar Port, transport infrastructure, energy and industrial cooperation.
Matiari-Lahore HVDC is the first project to adopt ±660 kilovolt direct current technology outside China with complete Chinese intellectual property rights, according to Shan Shewu, chairman of China Electric Power Technology and Equipment Co Ltd which is a subsidiary of SGCC.
