HARIPUR: Federal minister for energy resources and petroleum Omar Ayub Khan has said the country will have 80 per cent energy mix from indigenous fuel resources by the year 2030 that will help cut the power tariff considerably.

Talking to reporters here on Sunday evening, he said the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf government had prepared the most advance system known as Indicative Generation Expansion Plan to help determine what kind of energy needed to be generated and at what rate. He said the new system would enable the government to generate electricity at cheaper rates with least cost methods of hydel power, solar biomass, geo-thermal, Thar coal and nuclear.

Mr Ayub said the last PML-N government had the opportunity to generate 4,500MW of energy through renewable sources but it opted for costly fossil fuel plants with the country having to spend about seven billion US dollars annually on fuel import as 70 per cent of the energy mix was dependant on imported fuel.

He said the incumbent government had brought the per unit rates of solar energy to Rs6.5 from Rs24 prevalent in the PML-N government.

To a question, he said the government was working on management contract and outright privatisation of Discos because there was need of investment of billion of rupees for improvement of the distribution system. He said the prepaid system and automatic metering infrastructure were also in the pipeline.

The federal minister said the country had 33,200MW installed capacity while the demand ranged between 24,500 to 25,000MW. He said there was only 18,000MW in distribution during the PML-N government due to the poor distribution mechanism and infrastructure.

He said the PTI government had spent Rs76 billion on distribution system improvement. He claimed there was no loadshedding in the country, saying the campaign against power theft continued unabated. He said some political heavyweights were caught stealing electricity in Sindh but the PPP government did not allow registration of cases against them.

Published in Dawn, February 22nd, 2021