A few policy tweaks can make renewables work.

Byline: Gul Hassan Bhutto

THE world's energy mix is changing to give priority to clean and renewable energy technologies to counter the looming threat of climate change.

The Bloomberg New Energy Finance's New Energy Outlook report for 2019 estimates that global power generation capacity will shift from its 57 per cent fossil fuel base today to 66pc renewables by 2050. The additional generation capacity of 12,000 gigawatts will require an investment of $13.3 trillion by 2050, 77pc of which will go directly to renewable and energy storage technologies.

Global power sector emissions are on track for the 2 degrees Celsius pathway until 2030. Zero-carbon technologies will provide more than half of the world's generation needs by 2030, overtaking fossil fuel for the first time. However, aggressive decarbonisation will be needed beyond 2030, including the transformation of transportation from liquid hydrocarbons to renewable electricity, to keep the temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

In line with global trends, Pakistan is also planning energy transition towards a greater share of alternative and renewable energy (ARE) in its system. Developing AREs locally will form a key component in this respect.

Without significant scaling up and indigenisation, we can't expect renewable technologies to meet government's targets of 20pc (8,000 megawatts) by 2025 and 30pc (16,000 MW) by 2030, as envisaged in the draft ARE Policy 2019.

The draft policy will be put up for a final review and approval from the Council of Common Interests (CCI) in its next meeting on Dec 23 (today). The draft was supposed to be carved out of the National Energy Policy and in concert with other key policy documents and plans such as the Integrated Energy Plan (IEP) and Indicative Generation Capacity Expansion Plan (IGCEP).

Since these documents are yet to be approved, issuing the ARE policy before these can lead to conflicts and contradictions. Such risks should be avoided as much as possible.

The current draft of ARE Policy 2019 does not properly build on the four guiding principles of sustainability, affordability, responsibility (of use) and availability. It should be revised to clearly incorporate these principles.

At a minimum, the draft ARE policy should cover the following points before it is put up for approval before the CCI:

As indigenisation and localisation are imporAtant pillars of the national energy policy, the ARE policy should also clearly specify...