Greening energy provision in Urban Pakistan

Abstract

Entrepreneurship for green energy provision in Pakistan is direly needed to ensure universal access to energy, diffusion of renewable energy, and improving energy efficiency. Pakistan’s per capita electricity consumption is less than 467 kWh, which is very low compared to other countries in the region. Employing the green technologies is already creating new markets and job opportunities. In most of the developing countries in the world, the green technologies adoption has been slow. While governments have shown commitment to integrating these technologies into the economy, we have not seen a visible shift in the prevalence of green technologies in most of the developing countries. As with any new technology, it is the private sector and the entrepreneur that play a key role in commercializing technological inventions and diffusing them. In this chapter, we assessed the effectiveness of macro factors such as institutions, policies, and regulations, and micro factors such as access to finance, inputs, and infrastructure, which affect the private sector’s decision to invest in renewable and green technologies for providing energy. This chapter concludes that current institutions and policies have focused on grid-scale investments in renewable energy, which were not able to attract substantial capital. We proposed the importance of integrated planning coupled with decentralization of policy implementation to the local city or district level, a stable policy and regulatory framework that would mitigate investor risk. We also emphasize that private-sector entrepreneurship will thrive with the provision of enabling goods such as smart infrastructure, financing, and addressing gaps in the research and development ecosystem.