Energy management in South Asia

In this era, energy is essential to life and its continuous and ubiquitous supply brings much needed economic growth and prosperity to a region. Energy Management (EnM) contributes to the controlling and monitoring of energy and has recently become the subject of great significance. EnM involves analysis, conservation and imperative actions that leads to the minimization of the system losses for efficient use of available conventional and renewable energy resources of the region. This study evaluates the energy management in South Asia (SA) region, as it houses one-fourth of the world's total population with India, Pakistan and Bangladesh being the most populous countries. The study accesses the regional energy mix, distributed generation strategy plans, and present the trends in EnM over the past few decades. South Asian Countries (SACs), especially Pakistan, India and Bangladesh have a huge potential of coal i.e. 17,550, 90,085 and 884 Million Tonnes, respectively. India has rightly explored nearly 70% of its coal potential, whereas Pakistan and Bangladesh despite having the largest potential of the coal have focused on oil (35.4%) and natural gas (91.5%) exploration respectively. It is important to note that India experiences the highest technical losses of 23.5%, followed by 17% percent and 14.11% losses by Pakistan and Bangladesh respectively. Energy Intensity (EI) values for Afghanistan, Bhutan and Sri Lanka have listed these countries as low EI terrain region. Pakistan, India and Bangladesh have EI values ranging between 10,000 and 20,000 btu per $ 2000 constant. SACs countries have monopolistic electricity markets, however steps are taken to partially implement competition and monopoly regulation by privatization and ensuring equal conditions for all vendors. Analysis show that the SACs are presently far behind to meet their energy demands. The paper also recommends introduction and implementation of effective EnM policies along with large scale utilization of non-conventional energy resources, which will bring necessary changes and will help SACs to overcome economic challenges. The study also concludes that the inclusion of renewable energy resources and development of competitive electricity markets would overall improve the EnM in SA.