I stopped carrying a power bank around 2019, right after the scheduled load-shedding blocks disappeared from daily life in Kathmandu. Then, this past monsoon, I sat through two separate afternoons where the power in my building just went out with no warning and no schedule, and my phone died mid-client-call both times. I bought a power bank again the next week.
What Actually Changed in 2018
Nepal's formal, scheduled load-shedding, the kind with a printed timetable telling you exactly which hours your neighborhood would lose power, ended in 2018, mostly thanks to a sharp increase in domestic hydropower generation. That was a genuine, structural fix, and it's the reason an entire generation of Kathmandu residents has mostly forgotten what a load-shedding schedule even looked like.
But No Load-Shedding Isn't No Power Cuts
What didn't go away is unscheduled disruption: monsoon storms damaging lines, transformer faults, and the Nepal Electricity Authority's own maintenance work, which still shows up as sudden, unannounced outages in specific neighborhoods rather than the whole city. These are shorter and, in a way, more inconvenient than old-style load-shedding, because you can plan around a printed schedule. You can't plan around a pole that got hit during last night's storm.
Who Actually Needs One Today
If you work from home on client calls, or your income depends on your phone or laptop staying charged for a specific window, an unscheduled two-hour outage during a call is a worse problem than a scheduled one you knew about a week in advance. A power bank with enough capacity for two or three full phone charges costs less than an hour of a typical freelancer's rate and takes up less space than a paperback. It's not the emergency-preparedness item it was a decade ago. It's closer to a spare charger you're glad you own maybe four or five times a year, right when you need it most.
