Prime Minister Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif on Monday stressed the need to immediately shift the country’s power generation capacity to solar and wind power production systems as the costly power generation was continuously depleting the national exchequer.
During a briefing at the Mohmand Dam site, the prime minister said Pakistan had been facing a very acute problem of expensive power generation due to the import of expensive fuels, and then subsidising it for the consumers.
He said it was a three-tier loss to the national exchequer, as the country had been importing costly fuels for power generation and then reducing the cost of the power for consumers.
The prime minister, referring to the timely completion of the hydro power projects, opined that these hydro power projects and the tapping of other natural resources like solar and wind ‘are our future and we need to immediately shift to that direction, otherwise the economy will continue bleeding annually’.
The prime minister also expressed his serious concerns over the damage caused to dykes and the construction site of the dam in the recent floods, and said that it would delay its completion time and could hamper the country’s progress.
He said the dam’s construction was carried out by the Chinese and Pakistani people, and it would generate 800 MWs of inexpensive power, besides helping with water reservation and providing protection against flash flooding.
The prime minister also appreciated China as a best friend of Pakistan and said they had complete confidence in its support.
He reiterated that with collective efforts and support from the people, they would overcome the losses.
It was important to understand that the government had to provide affordable hydel power to the consumers and industries, and if the production was costly due to expensive fuel imports, it would continue to cause colossal losses, he added.
The prime minister cautioned that the national exchequer and resources would not be sufficient to meet such expensive power production of power.
For the production of power with the help of solar and wind power systems, the natural resources should be tapped, like the construction of dams, which would be helpful in the storage of water.
He underlined the need for timely completion of dams and said the country’s progress, prosperity, and economic development hinged upon their full and timely functioning.
The prime minister directed the relevant authorities to investigate the matter of impacts caused by the recent flood by hiring an independent third party.
He said there was a need to look into the factors as to why dams were breached by floods and what steps would be taken to avoid such damage in future, along with devising a future roadmap.
The prime minister, expressing his concerns, said that such a thing had happened in the Neelum-Jhelum power project and had now occurred here due to floods.
He said in the Neelum-Jhelum project, they had decided to hire independent consultants to thoroughly investigate the issue in a transparent manner.
Earlier, Wapda Chairman Lt Gen (retd) Sajjad Ghani gave a briefing on the project.
Mohmand Dam is being constructed on the River Swat in District Mohmand of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and will be completed in 2026.
On completion, the dam will store about 1.2 million acre feet (MAF) of water and help mitigate floods in Peshawar, Charsadda, and Nowshera. Besides, supplementing 160,000 acres of existing land, about 18,237 acres of new land will also be irrigated.
Mohmand Dam Power House will generate 800 megawatts (MW) of hydel electricity, contributing 2.86 billion units of low-cost and environmentally friendly hydel electricity annually to the national grid. The annual benefits of the project have been estimated at Rs 51.6 billion.