Former federal minister of water and power, Raja Pervez Ashraf, who has now graced the federal ministry of Information Technology, whose famous, definitive deadline on the end of loadshedding passed uneventfully insisted, while talking to reporters on April 19 outside the National Accountability Bureau, that there is no other short cut to ending the electricity crisis but to rely on rental power plants and around 140 countries are using RPPs.
He could well be right but only in the context of a country which has exploited all other existing resources of energy generation and distribution to the full, and pending completion of the ongoing projects, is constrained to rely on the RPPs as a stop-gap measure. In our case, where the installed capacity exceeds the actual demand, and where the existing plants are not used to the full mainly due to lack of planning resulting in the non-availability of fuel, and things like that, the statement does not sound very convincing, and that is putting it mildly.
In a recent discussion programme on the issue, it was stated that government buys lot of surplus electricity from the textile mills in Punjab, for which it has a policy, but when asked why does not the government buy electricity from sugar mills which have offered 2,000 mw of their cheaply-produced surplus electricity, the excuse given was that the government does not as yet have a ‘policy’ for purchasing power from sugar mills. Now, is the government waiting for angels to descend from heaven to devise for them a policy to enable purchase?
We also know that Dr Samar Mubarakmand had offered to solve all electricity problems through cheaply-produced Thar Coal Energy Project. However, recently he was heard on television complaining that despite having proved the viability of the scheme through the pilot project, he has not been allocated necessary funds to expand operations.
It would seem that the reason behind massive loadshedding is inefficiency more than anything else.
S R H HASHMI
Karachi
