Energy justice denotes the concepts of equity, affordability, accessibility and participation in the energy system and energy transition regardless of race, nationality, income or geographic location. Energy justice aims to make energy accessible, affordable, clean and democratically managed for all communities and to protect them from the disproportionate share of costs or negative impacts relating to building, operating and maintaining electric power generation, transmission, and distribution systems, and to ensure equitable access to 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. Hence, energy justice is significant for a country like Bangladesh to ensure access of all to affordable, safe and sustainable energy.
However, Bangladesh is becoming an extremely electricity-hungry country nowadays while the whole planet has witnessed a global crisis in the energy sector in recent times due to the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, climate change, brewing economic recession, Russia-Ukraine war etc. The global crisis has also exposed energy supply chain shortfalls. Liquefied natural gas has become eight times costlier and crude oil about five times, compared with April 2020. Just a few months back, it was thought that Bangladesh had left its power outage history far behind as it fulfilled almost 100% of power demand following rapid progress in this sector by focusing on capacity building as well as increasing transmission and coverage in the last decade. We have overcapacity to produce enough electricity but do not get enough resources at an affordable cost now because of a lack of prioritizing sustainable sources to produce electricity continuously. Consequently, the previously short outages, usually caused by a brief grid malfunction or a technological fault, have now transformed into the signs of an energy crisis.
Nonetheless, ensuring affordable, uninterruptable, and quality energy for all with limited resources and infrastructure is a great challenge for Bangladesh. Additionally, several factors, including a lack of time-befitting decisions, sustainable master plan and policy, administrative incapacity, system failure, resource constraints, growing preference, predatory expansion, corruption and limited energy storage systems, have accelerated the present power outage in Bangladesh.
Electricity generation in Bangladesh is mainly dependent on gas and coal, whereas the current gas reserves of Bangladesh are not sufficient for industrialization and power generation. As a result, it has become heavily reliant on the importation 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 them. The current massive price hike of traditional fossil fuels, i.e. oil, gas and coal in the international market, made the present power crisis inevitable in Bangladesh. A lack of exploration of alternative sources and initiative to spread and popularize renewable energy has created threats to supply and national security as well.
The government prepared a periodic master plan for electricity generation, namely the Power System Master Plan in 2016, which also focused on fossils instead of renewables and called for 35 percent gas and 35 percent coal-based electricity generation. As a result, 70 percent of projected energy demand in 2026 would have to be met through imports, despite domestic gas’s declining contribution to the energy mix. Therefore, the country’s energy security will face a threat in the coming days, which is also reflected by the current crisis. Conversely, renewable energy is being emphasized to reduce the dependence on natural energy and the effect of greenhouse gases globally.
Regrettably, the Power Development Board has recently drafted an Integrated Energy and Power Master Plan without following the energy justice approach. It prioritizes natural energy imports for the next five years, despite forecasts of the international energy market remaining volatile over that time. The draft master plan disregards the potential of expanding renewable energy, the need to explore internal gas resources and the need to phase out costly oil-fired power plants. It also lacks a roadmap to reduce power sector system losses.
The authorities should gradually concentrate on increasing investment in renewable energy to overcome the existing power crisis and reduce energy imports. Bangladesh holds ample exploitable renewable sources of energy that could be used to address and ease the country’s current power issue. Solar power plants, winds, tides, bio, hydrological, solar thermal, ocean waves and the Bay of Bengal should be utilized on a large scale at this moment to handle the situation.
Experts roughly estimate Bangladesh’s wind and solar power potentials to be 60,000 MW and 35,000 MW 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 after a certain altitude in our country. Arguably, it is possible to generate 33,000 MW at an 80-meter altitude from wind power, whereas the generation could be doubled by raising the height to 120 meters. Moreover, an agro-based country like Bangladesh may lean on biomass energy more, using only agricultural crop residues, animal manure, and municipal solid waste. Democratic management of energy, well-trained human resources, and modern technology can quicken this process.
The state should now take some immediate actions to combat the power crisis, including the adaptation of the energy justice approach in the energy system, emphasizing purchasing local gas at a low cost instead of importing it at a high rate and trying to reserve it, as well as concentrating on strengthening state-owned BAPEX rather than giving priority to foreign companies. Because we wouldn’t be able to afford the same previous mistakes of the policymakers in the energy sector anymore.
Nevertheless, being a developing country, maintaining a balance between affordability, environmental sustainability, and energy security is not easy for Bangladesh. Hence, it is high time the authorities established energy justice to frame a long-term sustainable plan to prevent another energy crisis of this kind in the future.
The Author has an LLM in International Energy Law & Policy as a Chevening Scholar from the University of Stirling, UK; an Assistant Professor of Law and Head of the Department at Dhaka International University and an Advocate at the Supreme Court of Bangladesh.
He can be reached at: raisul.sourav@outlook.com
