Daily Times

KARACHI: “Following the 18th Constitutional Amendment, sponsors of new wind energy projects in Sindh have been facing several procedural and regulatory issues,” said Sindh Additional Chief Secretary Dr Tanveer Qureshi on Saturday.

This he said while while speaking at a consultative session attended by managers and investors of wind energy projects in the province. Dr Qureshi, who is also serving as the head of provincial Energy Department said that Board of Revenue of Sindh Government was going to convene a high level meeting with federal authorities to resolve the land lease issue.

“Pending leasing of land in the Gharo-Jhimpir wind corridor is one of the major hurdles being faced by the investor while the Sindh government is working to solve the lease issue as early as possible in the best interest of the concerned investors,” he informed the gathering.

During his briefing, Qureshi said that production from 20 operational wind power projects in Sindh had gone up to 1037 Megawatts (MW) while another 200 MWs of clean energy would be added to the national grid by November, 2018 through completion of four more wind energy plants. He shared that 35 wind projects were in different stages of development in the province and these projects could generate up to 2500 MWs electricity.

Sindh additional chief secretary for energy said that previous governments could not give equal emphasis to all the facets of energy sector as issues of the energy sector investors including those willing to do alternative power projects had lingered on.

He said that it was high time that work on all these aspects of the power sector be done in tandem with each other in order to resolve all problems being faced in the energy sector.

He informed the meeting that the government had a natural sort of monopoly in the power sector but by no means should this monopoly be discriminatory against the interests of new power projects.

He said that a lot of issues concerning the investors interested in power projects had emerged in the aftermath of the 18th Constitutional Amendment when provinces took over several aspects of the energy sector got divorced from the center. “We should all keep in mind that energy is not at all a provincial issue as it is a national issue that has a lot to do with the economy and the GDP. The problems being faced in the energy sector have to be resolved through a national approach,” he remarked.

He told the gathering that the provincial government would effectively plead before the federal entities the case of the concerned investors doing alternative projects in Sindh so as to facilitate them and resolve their procedural and regulatory issues.

“From now onwards the Energy Department of Sindh government will adopt a proactive approach to resolve the problems arising in renewable energy projects. This includes recommending to the chief minister the most relevant agenda points on behalf of the power sector for further discussion at the meetings of Council of Common Interests,” explained the additional chief secretary.

Engineer Mehfooz A Qazi, director Alternative Energy at Sindh Energy Department, also spoke on the occasion and briefed the participants about steps being taken to promote wind energy production in the province.

During the consultation session, representatives of different wind energy projects informed senior provincial government officials present about different regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles they had been facing mainly from the federal entities. The representatives informed the officials that such hurdles were preventing them from working in a desirable manner and causing a delay in making wind energy projects commercially operational.

Published in Daily Times, August 12^th 2018.