Daily Times

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Unlike Captain Kirk, I live in what I presume is now the 21st century, in a city called Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s province Punjab. Having been hooked to Star Trek as a child, never did I once fantasise about joining the Enterprise on its voyages, so scared was I of the darkness it had to travel through. Little did I know that less than three decades later, I would be recruited, against my will, in another sort of darkness, sitting in an entirely different Pakistan!

As I browsed through my morning paper, I was amused by an advertisement spanning half a page, by the ‘arrow’ dedicated to the ‘lion’, featuring several headlines taken from newspapers of yesteryears captioned: “Who is responsible for today’s load-shedding? Who had stopped in the dark year of 1997, 24,000 Megawatt Power Projects?”

I am sure that the ordinary Pakistani, like me, does not care about who did what; all we are concerned with is that there is no electricity for us to live our ordinary lives. It is frustrating for me as a working professional on strict time-rationing to put the laundry into the washing machine, only to discover 15 minutes later a tub laden with soapy water, coloured clothes and no electricity! Hence, I have decided to invest in a dhobi-ghatt (open-area concrete washer pen) and a danda (washer’s bat), or in the alternative, start a designer tie-and-dye clothing business! When I go to my kitchen, the same happens; no, not the soapy water thing, just the absence of electricity, pushing me to master the art of cooking in the LED and candlelight. Or perhaps I should cook outside on an open fire, just like my grandmother used to in the village, and serve dinner before sunset, just like her! Leaving us to read bedtime stories in lantern-light, my grandmother used to say her Isha (night) prayers and go to sleep, only to wake before sunrise. With the rooster still cock-a-doodling, she used to get her entourage together for the cleaning routine. Brooms would be swept under our beds and we would be duly chastised for having wasted an entire half-day sleeping, so precious was the daylight! So following in her tradition, I have invested in charpoys, mosquito nets and am on the lookout for a mashk (leather water-carrier), so the entire family can sleep on the rooftop, with water sprayed on the beds and floor! As the urban Pakistanis know, ‘no electricity’ translates into ‘no water’ in the pipes or the tanks. Maybe one should consider getting a ‘bore’ and fixing a hand-pump on it or getting a well dug to promote development of one’s bi- and tri-ceps!

Areas in Pakistan without gas are still burning wood and cow-dung, and impressed by my Facebook FarmVille skills, my husband now wants to keep a cow to add to our vegetable garden and poultry stock and to provide alternative fuel for our needs. So dung-cakes may now grace my unplastered outer walls, as I sit and reconsider my true calling in life! Many ‘green-thinking’ nations are using cow-dung-powered plants to generate alternative energy, where the dung is converted into bio-gas, which provides heating and cooking solutions, and grass-fermented manure is used to fuel the wind turbines of thermal plants.

Last year, during our vacation in electricity-less Naran, we wondered why the raging power of River Kunhar had not been harnessed through water turbines to tackle the problem; again, the blame fell on the government. Later, we discovered that a few hotels in the area had installed their own water turbines but none on a larger scale by the state, which could provide electric supply to the entire area. While I was still lamenting the waste of such a valuable resource, my cousin came to Pakistan for a visit and while listening to me mourn, informed me that a friend of his was exploring reliable and cost-effective renewable energy options for residential and small commercial, middle-class customers. Pakistan has a lot of solar energy, and wind in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Karachi and Hyderabad. The ideal solution would be to harness solar energy in Punjab and to have a hybrid-solar, and wind in other areas, as there is sun in the day and wind in the morning and evening, resulting in a level localised production of energy. Excited by this revelation, I asked him to get me a windmill to fulfil my childhood fantasy! Since there is apparently no wind in Lahore, sadly I will never get my own windmill. I did try climbing on my water tank on the roof to mimic the ‘Titanic posture’, trying to feel the wind. Nothing but a light breeze!

Imported wind turbines are very expensive but those being manufactured locally by my cousin’s friend are a third of the cost of the foreign turbines, claiming to give the customer a very interesting load and energy management system to automatically lower the energy bill by selecting the lowest cost energy source and then matching the load respectively.

I recently read a paper on “Pakistan’s Power Crisis: How Did We Get Here?” by Munir and Khalid, published in The Lahore Journal of Economics in September 2012. While no economist myself, most of it flew right over the top of my head, but the simple crux was that with over 20 different organisations involved in the power sector there was a huge scope of governance failure and ‘much malfeasance perpetrated by political and other interests’. The authors argue, “In the 1980s, the country’s electricity generation relied on a fuel mix of approximately 60:40 in favour of hydropower versus thermal. This changed dramatically over the next decade with the fuel mix going to 30 percent hydropower and almost 70 percent thermal by the end of 2010. According to a recent World Bank report, oil now accounts for nearly 40 percent of electricity generation with gas and hydropower at 29 percent each… This dramatic shift in generation source occurred because the 1994 power policy (and later the 2002 power policy) did not discriminate on the fuel source being employed and made the country hostage to fluctuations in international oil prices.” The solution: “The right incentives with respect to an optimal energy mix are crucial. The ideal scenario is to shift to hydropower and indigenous coal resources, and continue to develop other renewable sources such as wind and solar power. In the short term, shifting to imported coal or gas might be one solution. However, changing the energy mix provides only a partial answer. The arrangement under which private or public providers of energy come online is equally important.”

Electricity load shedding has destroyed Pakistan and Pakistanis. It has killed our economy and is pushing us into the darkness, not space. We need to put our appliances in museums and go back to manual labour and basics. We direly need to invest in alternate energy: bio-gas, wind and water turbines and solar energy, which we have no shortage of. Pakistan: the final frontier. These are the voyages of an ordinary Pakistani’s ‘Daily Enterprise’. Its mission impossible: to explore strange new ways, to seek out new renewable resources and revert to ones left behind, to boldly go where no man has not gone before…an odd sense of déjà vu!

The writer is an advocate of the High Court