According to news, The Government of Pakistan has revealed its plan to facilitate major trade hubs, big housing societies and cities in setting up their own power generation plants owing to its inability to overcome electric crises in the country. Societies like DHA and Bahria Town and cities like Faisalabad and Sialkot have shown their keenness in generating power with non-traditional and traditional fuels.
A government official reported that in order to prevent existing consumer tariffs from getting adversely affected, NEPRA (National Power Regularity Authority) must also improve the process of approving tariffs and issuing licenses for power generation besides changing policy mindset at the level of power generation and distribution companies. Sources also say that NEPRA is expected to help the deal incase the consumers without affecting normal categories of tariff, agree to a special tariff.
The official also gave an example of Bahria Town and highlighted that its members have no objections in giving tariffs to it against the use of electricity, since they know the uninterrupted power supply is being purchased from distribution companies. Though the chambers of commerce in Faisalabad and Islamabad had many offers to generate electricity from industrial and municipal wastes but they could not exploit these offers due to lack of reliable energy supply and proper measures to address environmental problems.
Some leading companies have showed their desire to generate and distribute electricity in collaboration with their respective Wapda distribution systems. These companies are also willing to guarantee the government that they would provide the produced electricity to it and the rates they would charge would be acceptable for most of the consumers. The official also highlighted that for the use of transmission systems, Wapda can be compensated through ‘tolling charge.’
The new model promises reasonable tolling charge to distributors by keeping in mind the previous loss of large number of commercial and industrial consumers in mind. The produced energy can be distributed to industrial and commercial consumer at the same or slightly higher rates which are currently being charged by Discos. The smooth supply of electricity and guaranteed per month payments would allow Discos to improve its performance in some other area. Moreover, Discos would also be able to concentrate on recoveries from problematic consumers.
A senior government official said that not allowing any community to set up power plants when government is not able to give them enough electricity to make profits and live a decent life, does not really make any sense. He further added that theses communities have money and desire to set up the plants and keeping in view their entrepreneurial spirits, government must allow them to solve some of their problems on their own.
