China helps Pakistan to shift to environment friendly power generation

Islamabad China is helping Pakistan to shift to environment friendly power generation for a safer future.

Minister for Energy Hammad Azhar said that Pakistan was committed to develop cleaner and environment friendly sources of energy and China was backing this policy.

He lauded China cooperation in this regard, saying the two allies wanted to ensure clean environment for the coming generations.

Azhar said China was appreciative of Pakistan’s environment friendly policy and had been supportive of the Pakistani efforts.

He highlighted the initiatives of Pakistani government to enhance the share of Renewable Energy in the energy mix up to 45% percent by 2030. “The future energy projects would be Renewable Energy based,” he pledged,

Even though Pakistan has a tremendous amount of potential to generate solar and wind power, it is utilising just 0.071 percent of the country’s area for solar photovoltaic (PV) power generation, according to the World Bank data. Wind is also an abundant resource.

Pakistan has several well-known wind corridors and average wind speeds of 7.87 m/s in 10 percent of its windiest areas.

However, despite a number of successful projects, the installed capacity of solar and wind energy in Pakistan, of over 1,500MW, is 4 percent of the total capacity, equal to around 2 percent of the total generation.

Optimus Capital Management Pvt Ltd Executive Chairman Asif Qureshi said that adding renewable energy resources to the main grid of the country depends on the advancement and price decline in the allied products to store the generated energy.

“The biggest concern for reliance on renewable energy is the variable factors, as the wind and solar cannot be directly stored or stockpiled and whose availability is difficult to predict,” he added.

He observed that the technology to store the renewable energy was not much developed in the country and the available technology was much expensive for Pakistan to add renewable energy to the national grid.

“The grid capacity is another factor to account for, as there are not many technologies to transit the generated renewable energy to the grid,” Qureshi maintained.

Talking about the government’s plan to produce maximum clean energy by 2030, he commented that although “the plan is looking quite an ambitious one but it is possible to achieve if the technology to produce, store and transit the renewable energy becomes advanced and cheaper than other means of producing energy.”

Hydropower, he opined, played a huge role in Pakistan’s power generation, as it accounts for around 30 percent of the total energy generation. Even though it does not fall in the category of renewable and clean energy, the low greenhouse gases emission in its generation coupled with the future technological advancement in storing and supplying of renewables could help the country achieve its plan to produce 60 percent of clean energy by 2030.

Pakistan is among the top 10 countries worldwide suffering the largest damages from the climate-related disasters since 2000, highly affected by climate change, while only contributing around one per cent to the global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), a report by International Monetary Fund (IMF) showed.

The country has experienced increase in temperatures, fluctuating levels of precipitation, and extreme climate shocks, according to the IMF’s 2021 Article IV consultation and staff report on the sixth review.

Over the past two decades, 120 recorded events have caused an estimated US $22 billion in material damages, left more than 55 million people affected and 11,000 killed globally, the document showed.

Pakistan is experiencing many adverse effects because of climate change and it still is expanding its domestic lignite production to replace the costly fuel imports that are bearing down on its foreign exchange reserves.

Burning lignite is said to be more polluting than other fuels, undermining the country’s efforts to bring in policies to address climate change.

The total installed power generation capacity is 38,700MW, whereas renewables contribute only 4 percent, while 57 percent of the energy comes from thermal fossil fuels, 31 percent from hydro, and 8 percent from nuclear, according to the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority’s (NEPRA) annual report.