Pakistan appears full of opportunity for clean energy. In March this year, it became the world’s first country to possess validated, high-quality solar maps. Even a cursory look at the maps - a joint project of the Alternative Energy Development Board (AEDB), an agency under the federal government, and the World Bank - reveals that the country is bursting with solar potential. As far as wind energy is concerned, the process of mapping potential wind energy is underway and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has already estimated that Pakistan possesses 132,000 MW of potential installed wind capacity.

But Pakistan’s relationship with clean energy has been non-committal. For every step we take towards renewables, we seem to take more backwards.

On the one hand, we set up Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power Park, which at the time of its inauguration was the world’s most expansive solar park. But on the other hand, experts say that setting up such a huge solar plant is terribly inefficient and renders the grid system unstable, i.e. it’s far more conducive to set up 10 smaller power plants, as opposed to one large one. While the Punjab government is providing 17,000 farmers with subsidies to convert 100,000 irrigation pumps from diesel to biogas by the end of 2017, we are signing national and international coal mining agreements and coal-powered power plants at a time when most of the world is abandoning functional coal mines and plants.

In neighbouring India and China, trends have been easier to understand. They are increasingly abandoning their coal plants and creating their energy supply from renewables (whether this is for the sake of economics or the environment is a separate argument). While Pakistan posits itself as a mixed bag of energy, statistically speaking our next five-year plan is heavily favouring fossil fuel (21 per cent of the predicted energy mix) over renewables (five per cent of the predicted energy mix), and this is a problem.

There is no doubt that there is endless opportunity for renewables. There are projects at the individual level, at the local and international NGO and development agency levels, and even at the federal level.

The first and the last are intricately connected: those who can afford it are buying solar panels for their homes and industries. These panels come at a big investment cost: a minimum of Rs60,000 if you want to operate something as basic as two fans and two bulbs. If you upgrade a little and purchase more solar panels and couple them with an inverter, you’re looking at an investment of about Rs1,500,000 -- about as much as a new car. But what’s the return?

Firstly, your electricity bill will drastically reduce; secondly, you’ll be reducing your carbon footprint; and thirdly, your inverter and a reversible meter allows you to sell the excess energy you produce back to your local distribution company (Disco), i.e. such as Lesco or Iesco will pay you every 6 months. Basically, you can invert the power business on its head, instead of being enslaved to the government for power, through solar, you can produce your own energy and sell it to them.

And you wouldn’t be the first. Lahore-based Almas Hyder, a council member at the National Commission for Science and Technology and the owner of a solar-solution business, claims he was the first to get a license from Nepra -- Pakistan’s power sector regulator -- for his reversible metre. Although he still has to wait a few months for his first payment from Lesco, he tells The News on Sunday he’s delighted with not having to pay energy bills and for reducing his carbon footprint.

Agriculture is another space where renewable energy has helped increase efficiency, and climate change resilience. The Pakistan Agriculture Research Council is piloting various alternative-energy based innovations to reduce dependence of farmers on grid-based electricity and diesel generators.

One particular research project, Himalayan Adaptation, Water and Resilience Research (Hi-Aware), which PARC is undertaking in partnership with LEAD Pakistan and ICIMOD, seeks climate-smart energy solutions for farmers. One pilot project is a portable solar water pump which enables farmers to procure water from nearby water bodies without canal linkages or diesel generators; it also reduces dependence on grid-based electricity. Another Hi-Aware pilot comes from Hunza where indigenous river-based water distribution systems are being combined with the latest in micro-hydel power generation technology to pilot local small scale energy solutions for small farming households. Small diversions from natural water courses like rivers and streams are used to run small turbines before the water flows back.

Such household level solutions are even smaller than village-level solutions such as the community-run micro-hydropower station in Ahmedabad in Punjab, that produces enough power to meet the demand of 254 homes in nearby villages. The future of energy lies in such small-scale, decentralised solutions. Gone are the days when the only viable source of energy were mega dams meant to supply huge amounts of energy to the national grid.

The question is this: when we have the potential for wind, hydel and solar energy, then why are we walking backwards towards coal? Isn’t better to harness energy that is cleaner and cheaper, given that the price of renewables is increasingly falling and the price of coal comes accompanied with social and environmental costs, not to mention the possibility of an international carbon tax.

The case against coal:

The Sahiwal Coal Power Plant, which began producing energy in April this year, is a solid example to cite the negative impact of fossil fuels. The plant, a project under the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), boasts a capacity of 1,320 MW in its first phase. But in energy-thirsty Pakistan, most projects are heavily politicised and there are differing opinions on the power plant. In support of Sahiwal, Environmental Protection Department’s (EPD) Naseem Ur Rehman says that since the plant has the latest technology, including electrostatic precipitators and sulphur control equipment, we can control, even omit, our carbon emissions. "Have you ever seen Japanese coal plants? They have zero emissions. Ours are the same," he says.

But Rina Saeed Khan, an environmental writer and researcher, disagrees. "There’s no such thing as clean coal," she says. "You can make the world’s highest chimneys to release the coal emissions and black carbon [the Engro project in Sindh is in fact claiming to have constructed the world’s highest coal chimneys] far away from land but eventually those pollutants will end up on our planet," she says.

Khan also adds that transporting coal from the port to Sahiwal, a journey of about 1,000 kilometres, in open bogeys, is an environmental disaster. "Every town, village and field the bogey will cross, will feel the effects of coal dust," says Khan. Meanwhile, Rehman maintains that the EPD recommended that the bogeys must be covered. But that was expensive. So they remain open and generously distribute coal dust along the country as they snake their way to Punjab.

The third argument against the plant is that since Pakistan’s indigenous coal, found in Thar, cannot be transported to Sahiwal since its type is such that it will combust if left outside for too long, the coal for Sahiwal has to be imported from other countries. This will negatively alter our balance of payments, thereby defeating the point of economical energy.

"The government’s argument for choosing Sahiwal," as told to The News on Sunday by someone privy to CPEC projects and who wishes to remain anonymous, "is that only the Punjab government is capable of executing such projects in a timely manner, and that since Punjab is the load centre of the country, hence they should have the plant located within Punjab."

And the government’s argument for choosing coal? Well, at first coal was chosen because it was indigenous, hence cheap. But when that argument ‘combusted’, and imported coal was decided upon, the reason the government had was that renewables cannot support our base load. "Hence, we had to pick a fossil fuel for our base load," says Amjad Ali Awan, the chief executive officer of AEDB.

The centre needs to move away from centralisation:

The base load on a grid is the minimum level of demand on an electrical grid over a span of time. "The government doesn’t believe that solar, wind and hydel energy is reliable. They perceive renewable energy as ‘intermittent’ (reliant on daytime, wind pressure etc) and hence, don’t trust that intermittent energy can increase their base load," says Usman Ahsen, the founder of Kinetic Power, a company that provides solar solutions to homes and industries.

The government is probably right in believing that our current grid system is not yet advanced enough to manage intermittent renewable energy (although theoretically this is possible, as can be seen in Denmark). But why is the government so overly attached to our centralised national grid, with its inefficient transmission lines.

"Our larger philosophy about energy is a bit archaic. The rest of the world is focusing on decentralising energy, especially at the renewable level," says Basharat Saeed, a climate change consultant at LEAD. While other countries are furiously experimenting with less-centralised systems of renewable energy generation and transmission, we seem stuck to the current model of the grid which was conceived over a 100 years ago, and is now becoming increasingly redundant.

Although it appears that the government has locked itself into a handful of upcoming coal-powered projects, Khan believes, and for the sake of the environment one hopes, that many will fall through. "The coal projects under CPEC are the ones most likely to go forward," she says. This leaves a lot of space for environmental and clean energy activists to make noise.

"We are not yet part of the clean energy revolution, but we have all the fundamentals required," says Muhammad Anwar Ul Haq, an engineer by training who is the former chief strategy officer of the QUA Solar Park and is working closely with the government on other power projects. In his opinion, we need to focus on providing financial solutions for residential and commercial actors to buy solar solutions, which are easy to install and operate. Banks should create products that make buying solar cheap, and this should be encouraged at the national policy level.

"If the government even provides incentives just for rooftop solar products, we can switch away from using generators and that will put us on a track towards clean energy," says environmentalist Khan.

The basic problem, it seems, is that the government does not have a vision for achieving clean energy. Although, Rehman of the EPD maintains that Pakistan has already joined the revolution given the amount of solar and wind output we have, even he can’t help but add that from the perspective of an environmentalist, the future percentages of renewables, especially solar needs to grow and this can only happen through government subsidies. "We can only make suggestions and recommendations," laments the EPD official. "The policy is only made by the ones right at the top."

However, it appears that there is limited understanding of renewables at the government level. They are paying heed neither to the environmental argument nor the economical one.

This article was published in The News on Sunday on July 30, 2017 under the title Our philosophy of energy.

The story has been updated to show complete names of the NGOs participating in Himalayan Adaptation, Water and Resilience Research.