A meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Energy (CCoE), chaired by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday, approved the high-level design of a National Integrated Energy Plan for 2027-2060, launching a long-term effort to coordinate power, petroleum, gas and other energy planning across federal and provincial institutions. It has been claimed that the long-term plan is aimed at ensuring energy security and economic competitiveness in Pakistan’s power and energy sector. Under the plan, a strategy will be devised to supply electricity to industrial and domestic consumers at reasonable rates, while promoting low-carbon energy and environmentally and climate-friendly power-generation sources.
A long-term plan to ensure coordinated planning and implementation was overdue as the energy sector is still plagued with a number of problems despite tall claims made by the successive governments to reform the sector. It is a matter of serious concern for consumers that the governmental actions have pushed energy prices to an alarming level whereas the quality of the service has deteriorated further. Incidentally, the plan, which promises provision of electricity at affordable rates to both industrial and domestic consumers, has been approved at a time when people are demanding a substantial cut in tariff whereas the discos are proposing further increase in prices citing a hike in price of the RLNG. The proposed plan, if implemented in letter and spirit, has the potential to take care of almost all aspects of the energy sector. It covers issues like integrated energy planning, enhancement of power generation, supply of renewable energy to remote areas, cross-border electricity trade, expansion of the transmission network, tariff design, electricity conservation, system and market operations, risk identification and administrative matters. It also envisages greater use of indigenous resources, renewable energy and emerging technologies such as energy storage, while reducing reliance on expensive imported energy where economically and technically feasible. This aspect needs clarity as a number of moves launched by the Government in recent months strengthen the common impression of hostility towards adoption of newer and affordable technologies, apparently to provide undue benefit to the existing exploitative system. Similarly, the final plan should include provisions for parliamentary vetting of the so-called investment agreements in the energy sector as most of the problems of the sector are linked to questionable terms like capacity payments to IPPs.
