IT was almost inevitable, and now we have it from the horse’s mouth. When the government announced that it was contracting surplus power-generation capacity so that it could close down inefficient, more expensive power plants currently supplying the grid, it was up for debate what fate would befall renewable power contracts that are either in the pipeline or aspiring to be. Now the energy minister, Mr Awais Leghari, has confirmed that the government feels no obligation to consider any more expressions of interest for renewable power since “load-shedding has ended” and the goal presumably achieved. This is precisely the kind of thinking that the nascent revolution in renewable energy needed to be protected from, and it is precisely what has come to pass.

This is nothing short of tragic. The short-sightedness involved in this assessment — to see renewable energy as a short-term solution to load-shedding — is disastrous and will cut us out of a global revolution as prices of solar and wind power drop with almost every passing month. More importantly, the renewable energy revolution renders the whole concept of ‘load-shedding’ obsolete. Pakistan needs to urgently accelerate its adoption of what is called ‘point-of-consumption generation’, where small wind and solar turbines installed on rooftops and vacant plots near factories supplement the power provided by the grid. This model works best when there is concerted attention by the state to enable net metering, where surplus power generated through point-of-consumption renewable sources is sold back to the grid when it is not needed. The idea is not so crude as ‘ending load-shedding’. The idea is to put in place a model that enables the rapid spread of renewable energy technology, to the point where it eventually begins to replace grid-supplied electricity as the primary source. If our government, and its ministers, could see this far, they would not talk of axing renewable energy because “load-shedding has ended”.

Published in Dawn, December 15th, 2017