Webinar by Badar Expo with KPWS Consulting and Jubilee Corporation
In the third week of October Badar Expo Solutions organized a webinar on the topic of “Electric power, industry issues and options”. The webinar was arranged on Zoom. Mr. Khalid Pervez, CEO, KPWS Consulting acted as the moderator at the webinar and the panelists included Engr. Tahir Basharat Cheema advisor WAPDA, Dr. Fiaz Chaudhary Director LUMS energy institute and Mr. Irfan Ahmed, Chairman, IEEEP Karachi. The Webinar was sponsored by Jubilee Corporation.
The webinar started with a brief introduction of the panelists after which Mr. Khalid Pervez invited Dr. Fiaz Chaudhary Director LUMS energy institute to share his insights regarding the problems being faced by energy sector in Pakistan.
Dr. Fiaz highlighted the major problems of the power industry explaining that affordability was one of the primary objectives in the beginning but with the passage of time and restructuring of WAPDA it was mishandled and now it has led to the highest circular debt in history which is about 2.28 trillion. He emphasized on the fact that during the transition from WAPDA, when NTDC was formed, PEPCOs and DISCOs were not handled with the professionalism they required and this has led to a constant erosion of the sector. “The ever increasing prices and circular debt are all symptoms of the underlying problem that is poor structuring and lack of professionalism of the institution,” he said.
Engr. Tahir basharat cheema while describing another facet of the problem said that currently only 64% of Pakistan is provided with electricity from the national grid as compared to Bangladesh where the whole country is provided with electricity. He further said that the governance of WAPDA is not up to the mark and needs to be looked into on a priority basis. “We are planning to set up solar panels at inaccessible places which is not a permanent solution” he said. “I think it is a good initiative from NEPRA to offload retails to private sector and focus on setting up infrastructure for transmission,” he added.
Mr. Irfan Ahmed explained in great detail how the domestic load in Pakistan is more than double the industrial load and the losses in Pakistan are three times more than the world average. The main is that we have agreed to expensive power purchase agreements and have to provide capacity payments to power plants even when the load is not present. “We need to exploit the potential of renewable energy which is 400,000 MW for wind and 2,000,000 MW for solar energy. The total installed capacity in Pakistan is 33-34 thousand MW,” he said. Mr Irfan also laid emphasis on the importance of local production of parts. “We can build wind towers and solar cells locally. This will not only save cost but also help revive the industry,” he added
The panelists appreciated the efforts of Badar Expo solutions and Jubilee Corporation for organizing such events to discuss the current issues.
