Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa believe that the decisions of the Cabinet Committee on Energy (CCoE) as regards the revision of ‘Renewable Energy Policy’ may hurt their renewable energy projects costing over US$3 billion. The issue is so serious that Chief Minister Sindh Syed Murad Ali Shah was forced to write personally a handwritten letter to the prime minister how the committee’s decisions work as a disadvantage to provinces. Also, Chief Minister of KP, Mahmood Khan protested the CCoE decision. The provinces believe it is an intrusion into their constitutional jurisdiction on the part of the federal government and thus it should reverse the decisions of the committee. They have asked Prime Minister Imran Khan to reverse the CCoE decisions which are negatively affecting the development of renewable energy sources and over $3 billion investments.
The CCoE has discontinued the Renewable Energy Policy of 2006 and such decision was conveyed to the provinces in March. Now, work on Renewable Energy Policy 2019 is underway. Murad Ali Shah has written that the CCoE has taken arbitrary policy decisions in violation of Article 154 of the Constitution by encroaching and transgressing into the domain of the Council of Common Interests. The committee is a partisan forum where the provinces have no representation, he says.
The issue with Sindh is that as per CCoE decision all the renewable energy projects which have been issued letter of intent (LoI) but have not received a tariff from the NEPRA would be dealt with the new policy.
Sindh would suffer the most as 53 of its projects both wind and solar ones designed to generate 3,425MW have been slashed from the list of active projects. It would deprive the province of foreign direct investment of $2.3bn and loss of the confidence and time of the investors. Besides Sindh, the decisions of the committee would not only jeopardize committed investments but also discourage future renewable energy investments in KP.
KP government which is concerned seeks personal intervention” of the prime minister and wants a number of projects exempted from the CCoE decision so as to facilitate their completion. Interestingly enough, Islamabad neither issued any new policy nor shared any draft with the provinces and also any legal framework for competitive bidding under the new policy. It leads to the province to suspect that the center is intruding into the jurisdiction of the provinces.
The provinces have demanded that the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra) be directed to process all applications given LoIs under 2006 policy and decide the tariff besides stopping the cabinet committee from stepping in the domain of the CCI.n
