Learning from best practices in renewable energy

Islamabad : Oliver Knight, senior energy specialist, the World Bank, said that the most optimum capacity expansion pathway for Pakistan is through increased expansion of solar and wind capacity as it will decrease the utilisation of existing generation facilities which are no longer competitive.

Mr Knight was speaking at a webinar on “Future directions for Variable Renewable Energy deployment in Pakistan— A discussion on the findings of the World Bank’s VRE report” jointly organised by Sustainable Development Policy Institute and Pakistan Renewable Energy Coalition.

Mr Knight opined that achieving targets of 30% RE by 2030 would require some investments in transmission capacity of Balochistan.

Shahbaz Ahmad, Manager, Power System Planning, National Transmission and Dispatch Company while providing details on revised version of Indicative Generation Capacity Expansion Plan (IGCEP) 2030, informed the participants that wind and solar in plan are added at around 4000 MW due to displacement of expensive thermal power plants.

Syed Aqeel Hussain Jafri, Director Policy, Alternate Energy Development Board, was of view that while the policy targets dictate an increasing share of renewable energy in energy mix, any development has to be based on the outputs of IGCEP once it is approved. The revision of IGCEP should be carried out after every two years to incorporate the decreasing cost of technologies, he added.

Amin Lakhani, Director, Clean Energy Projects on the USAID funded Sustainable Energy for Pakistan (SEP) project, highlighted that 88% of capacity expansion in plan was due to committed projects and NTDC.