June 21, 2002	Friday	Rabi-us-Sani 9, 1423

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ISLAMABAD, June 20: The government is considering the launching of an electrification project in the remote coastal villages of Sindh and Balochistan at a cost of Rs32 million using wind energy.

An official source told Dawn that the government had already approved the project to install wind turbines in collaboration with the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) and National University of Science and Technology (NUST).

The pilot project, to be executed by the Pakistan Council of Renewable Energy Technologies (PCRET), intends to demonstrate the effectiveness of wind energy for power generation and water lifting/pumping.

The source said that initially a few imported wind turbines would be installed in the coastal regions. But a simultaneous indigenous programme would also be initiated.

The source said that a private Karachi company is already producing wind turbines for water-lifting, but at a very small scale.

In Balochistan, out of the 13,700 villages, Wapda has electrified only 3,154 because of the high cost of developing the power infrastructure, he said.

The source emphasized the need to tap other sources of energy and quoted estimates to suggest that with the present utilization of resources, the country will run out of oil and gas reserves in 15 years.

The exploitation of these resources for the production of electricity under the participatory system of development, would supplement energy being provided by Wapda at a much lower cost because there would be no laying of high-tension cables, transformers, meters, and manpower to maintain the systems.

He said that the situation of electrification in Balochistan was serious as a vast area of the province was without electricity and faced serious challenge of energy deficit. Many villages and districts do not have centralized electricity grid and there was no hope of getting it in the foreseeable future, because of the scattered population. To involve the people of the area in the selection of sites, a management committee would be constituted with the help of Nazimeen which will be responsible for the operations of the project.

The source said that Mother Nature has endowed many parts of Balochistan and other places in the country with sufficient renewable resources like wind and solar energy that could be economically used for power generation.