Power from garbage

An engineering professor appears to have constructed a 20MW power plant that runs on municipal solid waste in Peshawar

Perhaps, the only good thing about being a country as energy-starved as Pakistan is that the lack of electricity often sparks creative solutions among the more enterprising of our citizens. That appears to be the case with the project at CECOS University in Peshawar, where an engineering professor appears to have constructed a 20MW power plant that runs on municipal solid waste. Professor Riaz Muhammad’s efforts indicate a positive trend in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), with the government investing in research and development. The Directorate of Science and Technology is reported to have invested more than three-quarters of the cost of building the plant. While this effort is laudable, it also highlights what is missing in public policymaking in Pakistan. This power plant, for instance, is too small and thus generates electricity at a relatively high cost. What is stopping the provincial government, or indeed the federal government, from providing grants to engineering professors to conduct research into creating more efficient power plants that have economies of scale and can produce electricity at cheaper rates?

The federal government is comfortable spending well over Rs250 billion on inefficient energy subsidies each year, most of which go to wealthier citizens who do not need the subsidy, while spending a pittance on the kind of investments that could solve the crisis. Investing in cheaper sources of energy is one way to mitigate the crisis, but an even longer-term vision would be the sort of project that has been set up in Peshawar: investing in alternative sources of energy and making them commercially viable. Municipal solid waste is a relatively well-developed energy source, with companies around the world engaged in generating electricity by burning garbage. There is no reason why entrepreneurial engineers, backed by government support and even private sector funding, cannot replicate that model. The K-P government has taken a positive step. It should exhibit the foresight to carry this initiative to fruition.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 5^th, 2015.

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