Holistic and Scientific Perspectives of Energy Sector in Pakistan: Progression, Challenges and Opportunities

In the modern era of high-tech machines and advanced technologies, Pakistan yet fails to mitigate its daunting energy crisis and power shortage of 2765 MW presently, which eventually affects the economy and well-being of the nation. This article highlights and discusses the key issues in the energy sector of Pakistan and how they give rise to the load shedding, tariff rates and environmental damage subsequently. Unfortunately, the country has the highest power production share of 63.9% from thermal power plants and least of about 5-6% from renewable sources. In contrast to renewable sources, the thermal power generation being exhaustible has many drawbacks such as rapid depletion of fossil fuel reserves, inevitable varying costs, shorter life expectancy and most notably the undesirable environmental impacts. In addition to all this, the transmission and distribution networks need to be upgraded to uplift the current carrying capacity of utility network otherwise may lead to the aging of system equipment, overloading of power and distribution transformers, increasing of power losses and many other factors contributing to the energy and economic concerns in the country. In the view of strategic analysis and detailed study made on the energy sector statistics, it is evident that Pakistan has promising potential of renewable energy resources especially solar, wind, and hydel to overcome the energy, economic and ecological problems in the country particularly and the region as a whole.