In what could be called a matter of great satisfaction, the country has successfully launched a third power plant with a capacity of 330 megawatts on indigenous Thar coal.
With this, total installed power production capacity has increased to 990 megawatts on Thar coal in three-years.
Meeting energy requirements from domestic resources is the only way forward for the country to address its longstanding economic woes.
This will not only help produce electricity at a significantly lower cost, but also cut energy import bills and save our precious foreign exchange reserves.
It would not be wrong to say that a criminal negligence was meted out to utilise the precious coal reserves at Thar.
If our successive governments had focused on utilising this source, the country today would not have been reliant on electricity produced from imported fuels which in fact is a burden on our econ-omy.
Anyway there is still time for us to fully exploit Thar Coal that has the potential to meet our en-ergy requirements for next several decades.
Apart from producing electricity, the reserves should also be exploited for producing gas and diesel.
Help in this regard can be sought from China, which has the technology and expertise to convert coal into liquid fuel.
Similarly, greater emphasis should be given to electricity generation from other sources such as hydel, solar and wind.
The government has recently approved construction of solar power plants. We should encourage investment in local manufacturing of solar panels and other allied equipment.
Glass and aluminium frames for the panels in particularly can be easily manufactured in Pakistan due to strong presence of this industry within the country.
This will bring down the cost of solar panels and woo the people solarise their homes. All this we believe will help the government to address once for all the issues relating to circular debt and line losses.
