Private sector urged to start clean energy projects in partnership with govt

The Sindh government will fully support the development of new clean energy projects under the public-private partnership mode to harness the vast solar and wind power generation potential of the province.

Sindh Energy Secretary Rehan Iqbal Baloch stated this while speaking as the chief guest at a seminar titled ‘Role of public-private partnerships in promoting renewable energy’ organised by the Energy Update.

He said Sindh had an abundance of resources to generate massive renewable electricity and the private sector’s support was needed to tap this potential. He said the waste-to-energy was one such mode of generating renewable electricity that was yet to be explored in urban parts of the province.

The energy secretary told the audience that the public-private partnership mode had successfully been implemented for extracting Thar coal for massive electricity production for the entire country.

“We are fully open to ideas as the private sector is more than welcome to come to us with their proposals for building new clean energy projects in the province as the Sindh government has its PPP [public-private partnership] unit for implementing such plans for the energy sector,” he said.

Sonia Ishtiaaq Soomro, strategic adviser of the Sindh Solar Energy Project, apprised the audience about the progress achieved so far in utilising the solar energy potential of the province with support from the World Bank.

She said the Sindh Solar Energy Project stood for establishing utility-scale solar parks, providing solar home systems to underprivileged people in rural areas, and using rooftops of government buildings for installing solar systems.

She informed the seminar that the Sindh government aimed to establish a solar park having the generation capacity of 400 megawatts under the public-private partnership mode by 2025. Energy expert Irfan Ahmed lamented that less than one gigawatts (GWs) of clean power based on solar energy was being produced in Pakistan when the clean energy resource could produce up to 2,900 GWs of electricity.

He suggested that the public-private partnership mode be urgently utilised to improve the functioning of loss-making power distribution companies. He also suggested that the government should minimise its involvement in the energy sector and only act as a facilitator to let the private sector come and run the affairs of power companies that have been mostly running in losses.

Rukhasana Zuberi, former chairperson of the Pakistan Engineering Council, lamented that the countries, which had launched their regulatory regimes for renewable energy projects almost the same time Pakistan introduced such systems, had shown massive growth in the production of clean electricity.

Naeem Qureshi of the Energy Update welcomed the overwhelming interest shown by the Chinese renewable energy companies in the clean energy market of Pakistan.