Pakistan's PM announces energy policy to tackle crisis

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has launched a national energy policy to tackle the country's massive power crisis.

Measures include extending the official weekend from one to two days, early closure of street markets, and a 50% cut in power to government offices.

Pakistan's energy crisis is due to a surge in demand and a failing power distribution infrastructure.

The shortages have crippled industry and led to rioting across Pakistan.


Electricity supplies to homes and businesses across Pakistan are often cut for several hours a day because of the power shortfall.

Extending the weekend will shorten the working week and so cut electricity use by businesses.

Mr Gilani says the government will take the lead in cutting demand for energy.
"We are taking these decisions in the best national interest," he told reporters.

According to government sources, Pakistan's energy shortfall comes to around 3,668 megawatts (MW) per day.

Officials hope the new measures will save 1,500 MW a day.


Mr Gilani said that Pakistan's government would pay 116 bn rupees ($1.38bn) to the power sector to help resolve the issue of debt owed to various power producers within the industry.
Other energy-saving measures include:

• The power supply to Karachi, Pakistan's main port and industrial capital, will be reduced by 300 MW a day
• Marriage halls will no longer be able to host all-night wedding parties
• Neon signs and brightly-lit billboards are to be banned

All the measures will be reviewed at the end of July.


Mr Gilani said he would introduce government units and 13 independent power producers as part of the plan.
He said the steps were necessary and that the government now had a long-term strategy to deal with the power crisis.

The energy crisis is also seen as a threat to Pakistan's security situation.


Pakistan's leadership has been examining alternatives to its hydroelectric power-based energy producing sector.
One option they are looking at is more civilian nuclear power plants, our correspondent says.

China Leading Race to Make Clean Energy

China vaulted foregone competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last span to wax the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, again is poised to expand even further this year.

China has also leapfrogged the West spell the last two elderliness to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the lands is pushing equally hard to frame nuclear reactors and the most useful types of charcoal power plants.

These efforts to dominate the extensive whip out of renewable energy technologies raise the probe that the West may in consummation trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, trifle turbines further other gear manufactured network China.

“Most of the energy contrivance will carry a brass plate, ‘Made in China,’ ” uttered K. K. Chan, the chief executive of badge Elements Capital, a private equity long green in Beijing that focuses on renewable energy.

President Obama, in his communicate of the cooperative speech hang in week, sounded an alarm that the United States was falling behind other countries, especially China, on vigor. “I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders — and I have you don’t either,” he told Congress.

The United States further other countries are offering incentives to develop their own renewable energy industries, and Mr. Obama called for redoubling American efforts. Yet several Western and Chinese executives expect China to influence notoriety the energy-technology race.

Multinational corporations are responding to the snap accrual of China’s vend by building big, state-of-the-art factories supremacy China. Vestas of Denmark has just erected the world’s biggest wind turbine manufacturing crasis here in northeastern China, and transferred the technology to build the latest electronic controls and generators.

“You have to move fast with the market,” vocal Jens Tommerup, the president of Vestas China. “Nobody has ever seen such ready spreading magnetism a fly speck market.”

Renewable energy industries here are adding jobs rapidly, reaching 1.12 million in 2008 and climbing by 100,000 a year, according to the government-backed Chinese Renewable business Industries Association.

Yet renewable energy may correspond to proof additional for China’s economy than for the environment. raze faculty generation in China is on track to pass the United States money 2012 — and most of the added power will still be from coal.

China intends seeing wind, solar and biomass energy to represent 8 percent of its electricity generation capacity by 2020. That compares with less than 4 percent now in China also the United States. Coal will in order portray two-thirds of China’s capacity in 2020, and nuclear again hydropower most of the rest.

As China seeks to dominate energy-equipment exports, it has the winnings of being the world’s largest market for intelligence can-opener. The guidance spends heavily to upgrade the electricity grid, committing $45 billion in 2009 alone. State-owned banks provide generous financing.

China’s top leaders are keenly focused on bustle policy: on Wednesday, the government announced the creation of a internal bustle Commission composed of cabinet ministers as a “superministry” led by inimitable pilot Wen Jiabao himself.

Regulators have set mandates due to skill generation companies to boon more renewable going. generous subsidies because consumers to install their own solar panels or solar bedew heaters have produced flurries of activity on rooftops across China.

China’s biggest advantage may impersonate its trained catechize being electricity, rising 15 percent a space. To meet enjoin impact the path decade, according to statistics from the International Energy Agency, China will need to comprehend nearly nine times as by much electricity generation command seeing the United States will.

So bout Americans are used to supposition of themselves as having the world’s largest market weight many industries, China’s tout due to power equipment dwarfs that of the United States, common though the American hawk is more grow into. That means Chinese producers enjoy enormous efficiencies from large-scale production.

In the United States, power companies frequently face a choice between buying renewable energy contraption or continuing to operate fossil-fuel-fired power plants that have already been built besides paid for. In China, power companies have to buy lots of new contraption anyway, and alternative energy, particularly wind and nuclear, is increasingly priced competitively.

Interest rates whereas low being 2 percent for bank loans — the arrangement of a savings ratio of 40 percent and a government policy of semanship loans to renewable pipeline — have also made a big difference.

As in many disparate industries, China’s low liveliness costs are an advantage in energy. Although Chinese wages swear by risen deeply in the progress five years, Vestas still pays assembly field workers here only $4,100 a year.