Zubair Qureshi Islamabad
A team of Danish experts in energy sector held two-day workshop and training sessions with the Pakistani officials from various public sector power and energy companies to sup-port the Pakistan government’s transi-tion to green and clean energy.
Since Pakistan has adopted an ambitious policy for Alternative and Renewable Energy (ARE) to transform its energy sector and generate 60% of all energy through clean and renew-able sources by 2030, Denmark, which is a global leader in green energy has entered into a collaboration with Paki-stan and the country’s experts will are exchanging relevant technical knowl-edge and the Danish authorities are providing technical assistance under the Danish Energy Transition Initiative (DETI).
The collaboration was formally agreed and signed on 14 July 2021 by Energt Minister Hammad Azhar and Denmark Ambassador Lis Rosenholm in the presence of several high-level civil servants from relevant Pakistani and Danish energy.
Pakistan Observer taking advan-tage of the Danish and Pakistani ex-perts’ presence under same roof caught up with (from Denmark side) Director, Global Cooperation, Danish Energy Agency (DEA) Mr Anton Beck, Country Manager, Global Cooperation, DEA, Mr Nadeem Niwaz, Deputy Head of Mission (DHM), Royal Danish Em-bassy
DHM, Mr Simon Kjeldsen, (from Pakistan’s side), CEO, Alternative En-ergy Development Board (AEDB) Mr Shah Jehan Mirza, Managing Director (MD) National Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (NEECA) Dr Sardar Mohazzam and Deputy Direc-tor National Transmission & Despatch Company (NTDC) Muhammad Adil and tried to learn about this latest co-operation between Denmark and Paki-stan in energy sector.
Anton Beck while highlighting vari-ous projects successfully executed by DEA in around 19 countries of the world said DEA looked forward to sup-porting the high ambitious Renewable Energy (RE) targets for Pakistan based on Danish experiences during decades.
Giving an example, he said almost 50% of the total Danish power system is based on wind power and at the same time the Danish security of sup-ply in the power sector has been sta-ble at 99.997 percent, which corre-sponds to an average Danish con-sumer being without electricity for around 40 minutes a years; and in practice many consumers never ex-perience an outage during the course of a year.
About the present cooperation with Pakistan, he said we had a very good dialogue since last year with Pakistan energy authorities and jointly identified three prioritized areas: Energy plan-ning and modelling, flexibility in the power sector to avoid curtailment of wind and solar production and energy efficiency in energy intensive industry.
He said the Pakistan RE targets for 2030 were definitely very ambitious but a newly World Bank study showed the targets could be met in a cost-efficient way. “We are happy to share Danish experiences to support the green transition of Pakistan energy sector,” said Anton Beck.
DHM Simon Kjeldsen while re-sponding to a question held the new exclusive collaboration (DETI) was a perfect match between – on the one hand – these ambitious energy poli-cies of the Government of Pakistan and – on the other hand – Danish core expert competencies as Denmark is a frontrunner within green transition, en-ergy efficiency and climate change mitigation.
