Today I attended a conference at Serena Islamabad “The need to switch towards a greener future: Lessons from China” arranged jointly by SDPI and PCI. I truly appreciate both organizations for their valuable efforts in organizing this event and addressing a key policy issue which needs to be addressed immediately.
The speakers did their best to highlight pertinent points related to RE industry in Pakistan.
However, as pioneer of the wind industry in the country, I was wondering how much more we should learn from our mistakes and how much more efforts we have to put in, collectively, to steer the ship out of turbulent waters and in the right direction. The direction we adopted quite late, half-heartedly, and then we went into all other directions, except the correct one – confused.
Many of the participants of today’s event knew that Pakistan has now multiple wind power projects operational among other RE projects, a very few of them knew that there are total 36 projects of 1842 MW in total, but nobody knew that in past few years, especially last few months there is huge curtailment of power generation from these wind power projects. We are talking about green revolution and not taking care of already established green energy projects.
In order to keep wind power plants ready for operation but not generating power has a huge toll because of the energy they import to keep the auxiliaries running. In this way we are making power generators into power consumers – pity.
It is humbly requested from the able leadership of NTDC / NPCC through this forum to fully utilize the potential of RE in Pakistan, at least from the operational ones, and remove the bottlenecks for this green energy evacuation. I am confident that they will address this issue on priority.
Another serious shortcoming in all such conferences and seminars is that we talk too much without putting words into action – unfortunately. AEDB was established in 2003 and even now in 2023, 20 years down the road, we don’t have a firm integrated RE development plan. The logical conclusion of such conferences should be a road map, future action plan, a way forward. But we prefer to meet & greet only. Reflecting on the name of today’s conference, I wish one of the lessons we should learn from Chinese is to talk less & do more.
The need to switch towards a greener future: Lessons from China
