Sindh aims to energise 200,000 off-grid rural homes in two years

KARACHI: After much delay, the Sindh government is now hopeful that its aim to energise some 200,000 off-grid homes in the rural parts of the province using solar power would be achieved in the next two years.

The solar home systems have to be installed in the underprivileged rural areas of the province under a World Bank-assisted programme to promote the usage of clean electricity in Sindh. The total cost of the Sindh Solar Energy Project (SSEP) envisaged by the provincial government is $105 million (approximately Rs30.08 billion). The WB has committed to provide $100 million (approximately Rs28.65 billion) to implement the project, while the Sindh government would arrange the remaining funds.

The SSEP has three main components: (1) establishing two utility-scale solar parks capable of producing a total of 890 megawatts of clean electricity; (2) utilising the roofs of public sector buildings, especially government offices and hospitals, for installing solar energy systems; and (3) installing 200,000 solar home systems to energise off-grid homes. The project was originally approved in June 2018, while it was supposed to be completed in September 2023. It has emerged that the projectâ€(tm)s timeline has been extended by two years.

During the last five years, there has been phenomenal progress in implementing only the second component of the project, which stands for installing solar panels on the roofs of government buildings. The solar systems have been installed at a number of public sector hospitals and healthcare facilities in Sindh.

In the next phase, solar panels would be installed at different offices of the Sindh government, public schools and colleges, the provincial assembly, jails and other public facilities while utilising the roofs of their buildings.

SSEP Project Director Mehfooz Ahmed Qazi told The News that the deadline to complete the project has now been extended to 2025. He said the provincial government has entirely revised the strategy to instal solar home systems to energise 200,000 off-gird homes. He added that the provincial government has decided to purchase solar systems in bulk on its own to instal them within the given time frame. A spokesman for the provincial governmentâ€(tm)s energy department said that the process to purchase the solar home systems has been started. Sindh Energy Secretary Abu Bakar Madni had said a while ago that the installation of the solar home systems had been delayed earlier because the beneficiaries of the programme had to bear a certain percentage of the cost of those systems, according to the original plan of the project. Madni said that it had become very difficult for people in the rural areas to financially contribute to purchasing these systems owing to their limited purchasing capacity due to high inflation. The provincial government recently came under fire in the PA when it was disclosed that up to 54 per cent of the population in the rural parts of the province was still without electricity. Replying to the queries of legislators, Energy Minister Imtiaz Sheikh told the House that the option of solar energy was being used to energise the rural areas because it was difficult to connect every village in the province with the national grid. Sheikh assured the lawmakers that much progress would be made in this regard next year. He informed the legislature that former president Asif Ali Zardari had also given special directives to progressively use solar power to energise homes in the rural areas. The energy minister told the PA that 8,572 villages in Sindh had been energised during the continuing rule of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in the province. He said that the drive to electrify villages would continue once the PPP comes into power in the province again after winning the upcoming general elections. During a recent meeting he chaired, Sheikh said that the availability of the provincial transmission & dispatch and grid companies would be fully utilised to overcome the energy crisis in the province. He mentioned that the Sindh Transmission & Dispatch Company had been successfully supplying 100 MW of electricity to power consumers in Karachi from the Nooriabad Power Project of the provincial government.

He said that a province-wide power sector regulator would be established in Sindh after the PA passed a relevant bill recently. The proposed regulator would enable Sindh to determine its own tariff of indigenously produced energy for the provision of uninterrupted and cheap electricity to power consumers in the province, he added.