Roundtable on ‘Renewable Energy Infrastructure’ held at Comsats

Islamabad: The Comsats Institute of Information Technology has organised a roundtable meeting on ‘Opportunities and Challenges to Private Sector Investments in Renewable Energy Infrastructure,’ says a press release.
In keeping with its aims and objectives of generating public discussion and research on important national issues the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) head and former ambassador Fauzia Nasreen and her team were the organisers of the meeting.
The roundtable was inaugurated by the Comsats Pro-Rector Professor Dr. Haroon Rashid. It was attended by representatives from the public and private sectors including Planning Commission, Alternative Energy Development Board, Winrock International, Sustainable Development Policy Institute and GIZ. The event was jointly planned by CIIT and Hanns Seidel Foundation.
Detailed presentations were made by Musadiq Ahmed Khan, Director General (Energy Management), Alternative Energy Development Board, and Qamaruddin from Winrock International. Their perspectives illustrated how both the public and private sectors can play their roles in meeting the current energy crisis by harnessing renewable energy on a long term basis. While giving an overview of government policies and plans to energise the renewable energy sector, salient points emphasised by Mr. Khan related to tariffs, distributed generation, bottlenecks and strategies to address them.
Mr. Qamaruddin presented the success story of Pakistan Commercial Biogas Programme (PCBP) of Winrock International and USAID. In addition to working at the community level a pilot project at Sukheki was launched by PCBP on commercial basis with the involvement of Nestle Pakistan Limited. Mr. Qamaruddin drew a comparison between the success rate of community-led projects and the commercial plants and emphasised that subsidies negatively affect the viability of such projects.
The presentations were followed by discussion where the participants shared their views on the basis of their experiences and expertise. The discussion focused on the questions of; policy and action gap in the renewable energy sector; the stakeholders’ concerns and coping with the existing challenges in fully exploiting the benefits of green technologies.
The conclusions drawn from the discussion were that: the quality standards in so far as renewable energy technologies should be determined and upheld; these technologies should be available at affordable prices; indigenization, innovation; commercialisation and robust R&D should be encouraged as well as facilitation measures for investment may be made through policy and market instruments.