ENERGY CRISIS AND THEIR SOLUTIONS IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

Energy is considered a pre-requisite to improving the human development index of a country as well as key for the sustenance and development of economic activities which in-turn improves the quality of human life. To maintain needs of accelerated human growth the economy needs reliable, uninterrupted and affordable supply of energy. Pakistan is among those developing countries where the need to tackle the challenges is significant. Ensuring availability of usable and affordable energy is therefore, the foundation of Pakistan‘s current and future developments. In recent years, the energy demand has increased significantly in Pakistan owing mainly to accelerated economic growth. Consequently, the energy supplies remained deficient to offset the growing demand of domestic, industrial, commercial and power generation needs. This study aims to explore needs, demands in Pakistan. This study also provides the recommendations about potential solutions to fulfill the energy needs and demands. The growth of the energy sector has remained slow due to a host of factors such as inadequate institutional framework, financial constraints, sky-rocketing oil prices, low interest of private sector, lack of political will and mismanagement towards energy resource development. To address the issue of energy crunch, the government must work towards a multi-faceted approach involving short term measures in bridging the demand-supply gap through energy conservation measures with awareness towards efficient use of energy and full utilization of existing capacity by reducing the line losses and associated upgradation of obsolete electrical grids along with long term measures of accelerated import of electricity and gas from other countries, utilize its vast coal reserves, develop small Micro Hydro-Power Projects (MHPP‘s) in run-of-theriver schemes for the short-term and large conventional dams with reservoirs in the long term, accelerate current and future programs of alternate energy development from wind, solar and nuclear power so as to overcome the crippling energy crunch faced by Pakistan.