Further to the letters on the above subject carried by Business Recorder on November 9 and 10, and discussions that followed, immediate concern of energy professionals covered what future urgent action should be taken to reduce impact of our energy crises.
News items "Load shedding not to be over by 2018" and "Pakistan ratifies Paris agreement on climate change" carried by the newspaper recently really demand basic implementation of obvious solutions. For over 200 million population, present plans to fulfil all power needs by 2018 simply cannot be met due to huge investments required as already indicated by international financing institutions.
We have to think differently and energy conservation is really the only answer which the present authorities are simply not ready to address. On one side, we have inefficient and highly polluting power plants producing very expensive electricity requiring heavy subsidies and on the other side, we have wasteful energy utilisation with inefficient equipment being widely used both in industries and in commercial buildings and for those privileged people who feel they can "afford" to waste energy, residential use of air-conditions, consuming subsidised power, is literally taking away the essential power needs of large sector of economy.
At this time, most important goals should have been to conserve energy since a kW of electric energy saved is better than a further generation of that kW, a Cu.M of natural gas saved is much better than an additional Cu.M of gas imported at high cost and with foreign exchange loss! How can this energy conservation be achieved to solve our basic shortages? Simple answer is to utilise combined heat and power/Cogen technologies wherever there are power and steam/hot water/air-condition needs and this technology really could meet our basic energy shortages since there are thousands of such applications in the country wasting enormous amount of natural gas and producing expensive power when they are really contractually committed to both SSGC and SNGPL to meet high thermal efficiency design.