Islamabad (APP): Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on Wednesday said that Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz government has fulfilled its obligation of ending severe power load-shedding and added 10,000 MWs of reliable, sustainable and cheap electricity to the national grid.
Addressing at a ceremony to launch the consumer friendly Net-Metering Framework here at the Comsats Institute of Information Technology, the Prime Minister said before 2013, the governments were only able to generate 20,000 MWs of electricity in 66 years, however in only a period of four years, the PML-N government added 10,000 MWs of electricity.
He said other projects to add another 15,000 MWs of electricity were in the pipeline and said this generation capacity would be enough to meet the needs of the country till the year 2030.
The Comsats Institute of Information Technology has become the first public sector university to add 100 KW of solar power to the national grid.
Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi said the streamlined system of Net Metering would provide incentives to the common people to not only generate solar energy for their personal use, but also sell it to the government and get good returns.
“The potential is vast and would lead to better returns on their investments,” the Prime Minister said and added that the country was now utilising a healthier diversified energy mix of hydel, nuclear, coal, LNG powered besides solar and wind generation.
He said today the quantum of load shedding has drastically reduced as the demand supply gap has diminished and the only issues were related to transmission and distribution constraints, that were being addressed. “Now our challenge is to make the system more efficient, reliable and cheap,” he added.
Awais Leghari said the new process had now been streamlined to enable the small consumers get a Net Metering connection in around a month’s time, instead of the earlier cumbersome over six month long period.
Minister for Science and Technology Rana Tanveer Hussain said the use of renewable energy was part of the country’s Vision 2025 for diversifying the energy mix initiative. He was appreciative of the Comsats Institute for Information Technology for taking a lead role and said it has seven fully functional Campuses across the country and was one of the leading universities of the country. He also mentioned the role of Rector Dr Raheel Qamar and its founder Dr S. M. Junaid Zaidi.
The Net Metering system can now be installed by any domestic or commercial consumer by submitting a simplified form to the local SDO and the term for the contract has now been extended to seven years from the initial three years.