Energy justice to combat energy crisis

Energy justice aims to make energy accessible and democratically managed for all communities, to protect communities from the disproportionate share of costs or negative impacts relating to building, operating and maintaining electric power generation, transmission, and distribution, and to ensure equitable access to the benefits from each system.

Energy justice is a community-centric approach that focuses on the ways communities should have a say in shaping their energy futures through policy involvement. And thus it is significant for a country like Bangladesh.

The recent global crises have exposed energy supply chain shortfalls. Liquefied natural gas has become eight times costlier and crude oil about five times costlier, compared with prices in April 2020. 

Just a few months back, it was thought that Bangladesh had left the power outage phenomenon back in history pages as it made rapid progress in this sector by focusing on capacity building, as well as increasing transmission and coverage in the last decade, and fulfilled nearly all of its power demand. 

We have more than enough capacity to produce enough electricity, but we do not get enough resources at an affordable price now because sustainable sources to continue electricity production were not prioritised. 

Ensuring affordable, uninterrupted, and quality energy for all with limited resources and infrastructure has become a great challenge for Bangladesh. Additionally, several factors, including the lack of time-befitting decisions, the lack of a sustainable master plan and policy, administrative incapacity, system failure, resource constraints, growing preference and predatory expansion, corruption, limited energy storage system, etc exacerbate the current energy crisis.

Electricity generation in Bangladesh is mainly dependent on gas and coal, but the current gas reserves are not sufficient for both industrialisation and power generation. In effect, electricity generation has become heavily reliant on the import of coal, oil, and gas from multiple overseas sources.

However, the international reserve of fossil fuels is not endless, and there are many power games and politics involved in the price and supply. The current massive price hike of traditional fossil fuels, that is, oil, gas and coal, in the international market, has made matters worse. It has also brought to the fore, the underdevelopment of alternative sources of energy and the lack of effective initiatives to spread and popularise renewable energy, which have created threats to the energy supply as well as to national security.

In 2016, the present government of Bangladesh prepared a periodic master plan for electricity generation, namely, the Power System Master Plan, which focused on non-renewable energy instead of renewables and that called for 35% gas-based and 35% coal-based electricity generation. Thus, 70% of the projected energy demand for generating electricity in 2026 would have to be met by imports, amid a declining contribution of domestic gas in the energy supply. 

Regrettably, the Power Development Board has drafted an Integrated Energy and Power Master Plan in 2022 without following the energy justice approach. It prioritises non-renewable energy imports for the next five years despite forecasts of the international energy market remaining volatile over that time. 

The Plan disregarded the potential of expanding renewable energy, the need to explore internal gas resources and the need to phase out costly oil-fired power plants, not to mention that it lacked a roadmap to reduce system losses in the power sector.

The authorities should concentrate on increasing investment in renewable energy to gradually overcome the existing power crisis and reduce energy imports. Bangladesh holds ample exploitable renewable energy sources that could be used to address and ease the country's current energy crisis. Solar, wind, tide, bio, hydrological, and geothermal energy should be utilised on a large scale at this moment to handle the crisis situation. 

Experts roughly estimate Bangladesh's wind and solar power potentials to be 60,000MW and 35,000MW respectively. A wind or solar power project is implementable within nine months to a year. Also, our wind potential is not confined to Cox's Bazar and other coastal areas only. We have a good supply of wind power above a certain altitude in our country. 

Arguably, it is possible to generate 33,000MW at an 80-metre altitude from wind power and that amount can be doubled by raising the height to 120 metres. Moreover, an agro-based country like Bangladesh may lean on biomass energy more, using only agricultural crop residues, animal manure, and municipal solid wastes. Democratic management of energy, well-trained human resources, and modern technology can quicken this process.

At the moment, the state should take some immediate actions to combat the power crisis, including adopting the energy justice approach in the energy system, putting emphasis on purchasing local gas at a low cost instead of importing at a high rate, and trying to reserve them, as well as concentrating on strengthening nationalised oil production rather than giving priority to foreign, privately owned monopolies. 

We will not be able to afford the same mistakes as those of previous policymakers in the energy sector anymore. 

Nevertheless, being a rising country and maintaining a balance between affordability, environmental sustainability, and energy security are not easy tasks for Bangladesh. Hence, it is high time for establishing energy justice as the basis of a long-term sustainable plan in order to deal with the current energy crisis as well as to prevent another energy crisis of this kind in the future.

Raisal Sourav has an LLM in International Energy Law and Policy as a Chevening Scholar from the University of Stirling, UK. He is an Assistant Professor of Law, Head of the Department at Dhaka International University and an Advocate at the Supreme Court of Bangladesh.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.