LAHORE: The German International Cooperation (GIZ), on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany, supports the textile industry of Pakistan to become sustainable and more competitive in times where it greatly suffers from challenges like energy security and its affordability.

This was stated by GIZ Senior Adviser Dr Frank Fecher at the concluding ceremony of a training workshop for energy managers of industry at a local hotel on Saturday.

Arranged by the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association (Aptma) and the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Authority (Smeda) with the collaboration of GIZ Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Project (REEE), the six-day extensive workshop was on Energy Efficiency and Financial Modeling of Energy Projects. There was also a special half-day seminar for the CEOs of industry of Punjab.

Dr Fecher said the participants of the training workshop were highly motivated and responsive to the trainer on every point.

Each participant who successfully passed the final exam was awarded a certificate and has become a new certified energy manager. In total, some 30 new energy managers were added to Aptma member mills.

Meanwhile, a spokesman said GIZ has also announced that it would further support their industrial partners, first of all Aptma, to institutionalise this kind of training. Aptma jointly with GIZ would conduct more energy managers’ trainings in last quarter of 2014. “The ultimate goal is that each member mill will have an energy team to increase energy efficiency in the textile industry in Pakistan. The Megawatts saved through energy efficient processes will be the contribution of the textile industry to overcome the energy shortage in Pakistan.”

The Aptma and GIZ cooperation was started back in 2008, followed by setting up of an energy cell, which was later converted into Sustainable Production Centre (SPC) in 2012. The prime objective of the SPC-Aptma was to make the textile industry sustainable by extending technical services to the textile industry, including energy efficiency, renewable energy and trainings for the technical managers of the textile sector of Pakistan. In 2015 the portfolio of SPC-Aptma would be complemented by social standards and water management in process technology prevailing in Aptma member mills.

So far, both Aptma and GIZ have achieved many targets including saving of 10MW electricity and implementation of energy management system in several mills, about 150 energy managers have been trained so far through training workshop held across the country. Subsequent to the techno-economic studies and reports done by GIZ-REEE on renewable energy many textile mills were considering adopting renewable energy for power and steam generation, in particular energy co-generation through biomass.

Published in Dawn, August 31th, 2014