The Sindh government will fully support the development of new clean energy projects under the public-private partnership mode to harness the vast solar and wind power generation potential of the province.
Sindh Energy Secretary Rehan Iqbal Baloch stated this while speaking as the chief guest at a seminar titled ‘Role of public-private partnerships in promoting renewable energy’ organised by the Energy Update.
He said Sindh had an abundance of resources to generate massive renewable electricity and the private sector’s support was needed to tap this potential. He said the waste-to-energy was one such mode of generating re-newable electricity that was yet to be explored in urban parts of the province.
The energy secretary told the audience that the public-private partnership mode had successfully been imple-mented for extracting Thar coal for massive electricity production for the entire country.
“We are fully open to ideas as the private sector is more than welcome to come to us with their proposals for building new clean energy projects in the province as the Sindh government has its PPP [public-private partner-ship] unit for implementing such plans for the energy sector,” he said.
Sonia Ishtiaaq Soomro, strategic adviser of the Sindh So-lar Energy Project, apprised the audience about the progress achieved so far in utilising the solar energy po-tential of the province with support from the World Bank.
She said the Sindh Solar Energy Project stood for estab-lishing utility-scale solar parks, providing solar home systems to underprivileged people in rural areas, and us-ing rooftops of government buildings for installing solar systems.
She informed the seminar that the Sindh government aimed to establish a solar park having the generation ca-pacity of 400 megawatts under the public-private part-nership mode by 2025. Energy expert Irfan Ahmed la-mented that less than one gigawatts (GWs) of clean power based on solar energy was being produced in Pakistan when the clean energy resource could produce up to 2,900 GWs of electricity.
