On Bill Financing Scheme to Promote Rooftop Solar PV

Use of solar energy to power households has grown rapidly worldwide in the past few years. Solar power presents ample advantages for the domestic consumer in the form of reliable and cheaper electricity with an average payback of 4 years. The current government is keen on promoting renewable energy in the country, as the Federal …

How Pakistan can achieve its Energy Efficiency Targets?

Importance of Energy Efficiency and Conservation for Pakistan Energy conservation and efficiency have been repeatedly termed as the low hanging fruit for achieving commitments made by countries at COP 21. Increasing cost of energy, growing energy demand, along with declining energy resources has driven countries, across the world, to ramp up their efforts in achieving …

Microfinance and Energy Access

Energy poverty or lack of energy access is one of the biggest hindrances to economic development of a country. The cross cutting nature of energy implies that it is central to securing almost all the other sustainable development goals as energy is linked to the objectives associated with poverty eradication, climate change, employment, better delivery …

Harnessing the Power of Business to Tackle Energy Poverty

  Ghulam Abbas, an aged man in his 70s, stokes fire to get some relief from the cold, as his wife, Zehra, lies beside him coughing incessantly. Zehra has developed lung cancer from the smoke fumes she has been exposed to everyday while cooking for her family. Few kilometers away from Abbas’s house, Nuriya is …

Census shows the real state of Pakistan’s electrification

The results of the population census show that the actual electricity access rate of Pakistan is 70.8% as opposed to previously estimated figure of 74%. This means an additional 17 million people in the country are without grid electricity. This takes the number of people, not connected to electric grid, to 60.6 million, from the previously estimated figure of 43.7 million.

New Energy Outlook – Looking to 2040

Bloomberg New Energy Finance has launched its New Energy Outlook Report 2017 which presents their long-term economic forecast for the world’s power sector. The key findings of the report are reproduced below: The global installed capacity is expected to nearly double to about 13,000GW by 2040, up from 6,800GW today.  While solar and wind are …

Microgrids: Key to lighting up Pakistan’s rural areas

In Pakistan, more than 32,000 villages in the country continue to remain without access to the electric grid, forcing the residents to use traditional sources of energy, including firewood, kerosene and diesel, for meeting their lighting, heating and cooking needs. For majority of these villages, extending the electric grid will continue to be a challenge due to the cost of infrastructure involved. In such areas, microgrids and stand alone systems can provide a viable alternative to building expensive thermal power projects and transmission/distribution lines.

Merger of AEDB with PPIB: What does it mean for future of renewables in Pakistan?

Now that the provincial governments have been empowered to initiate and approve renewable projects and cost of solar and wind energy projects are comparable to conventional energy projects, we don't need a separate agency for renewable energy. The same project processing duties that AEDB has been performing can be taken over by PPIB. As a matter of fact, AEDB would benefit from vast experience and resources of PPIB in executing private sector projects. AEDB manpower and resources will continue to be there. It is not being dissolved. 

Does Pakistan Need More Coal Plants?

Two imported coal power plants, one in Sahiwal and the other in Karachi, each of 1320 MW, should have been enough to meet the emergency. Additional coal plants should only be planned and installed in Thar. It costs 4 US cents of foreign exchange to produce one unit of electricity on imported coal and thus one coal plant would be result in an annual import bill of 400 million USD. Pakistan cannot afford to grow its economy on imported fuel. 

Has Nawaz Sharif really solved Pakistan’s Energy Crisis?

In this video, I talk about the history of electricity crisis starting from 1994 IPP Policy to General Musharraf's time (when hardly any public sector investment in the power sector was undertaken) to the present government when 10,000 MW is expected to be added. I argue that Pakistan will have enough generation capability in the …