Our energy security

That we need to enhance our power generation level is perhaps stating the obvious, but in Bangladesh the obvious needs constant harping upon to make that happen eventually. Energy is the engine of growth, but this is the sector that has received the least attention, its neglect reaching the nadir during the last government's regime when not even a single megawatt of electricity was added to our energy grid. Interestingly, it appears that somehow more money and efforts had been spent on building transmission and distribution facilities.
Neither have there been any tangible efforts to diversify our sources and devise ways to generate non-traditional or renewable energy sources. This has adversely impacted on our industrial growth not to speak of our overall economic performance.
This raises a serious question about the government's plan to reach power to all by 2020 at a roundtable held recently in the capital. And the energy secretary's assertion that the government would be going for the second best option of reaching power to 60 percent of the population by 2010 may sound pragmatic, but going by the large number of people left out of power coverage, not quite adequate.
It seems strange that while the rest of the world is moving towards tackling the issue of energy security by going for diversification of sources of energy, and involving in regional cooperation, like China and India we remain stuck in the backwaters, still talking about longer-term plans.
We would like to think that the policy planners are well aware of the problems of the combination of global price hike of oil and depletion of our most indigenous source -- gas. So, we have to get a move on to increase the level of energy availability.
We would like to see government allot funds for research and development in this regard to develop alternative sources, some of which are already being actively considered by many other countries like bio-gas, solar and wind energy. A gas, and more urgently a coal, policy be formulated to streamline optimal utilisation of the scant resources that will become even scantier and costlier in the future.