Month: September 2021

The Abu Dhabi National Oil Co (ADNOC) is the key corporate proxy at the centre of the U.S.’s Middle East pushback against increasing Chinese and Russian influence across the region via their activities in Iran (and Iraq). The awarding of exploration, development, and ancillary contracts for its onshore and offshore oil and gas fields is a principal mechanism by which ADNOC is used to promote engagement with countries regarded as ‘in play’ by Washington. A longstanding prime example of this is Pakistan and the awarding last week of the first…

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he Sindh government is going to mount a legal challenge to the Indicative Generation Capacity Expansion Plan (IGCEP) 2021. Speaking to Dawn on Tuesday, Energy Minister Imtiaz Ahmed Shaikh said the federal government has excluded the cost-effective energy projects of Sindh from the plan, which is against the least-cost principle of the IGCEP model. “The federal government has approved expensive hydel projects in the name of alternative energy while dropping Sindh-based wind and solar initiatives that will produce electricity at a cost of four to five cents a unit,” he added. Prepared…

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Have you been shocked by the unduly large electricity bills you have been receiving recently? You are not alone. Families across the country have been forced to pay unfairly high electricity bills in the past few months as billing malpractices by Pakistani power companies have gone unchecked by the apex regulator, a new Geo News investigation has revealed. Meanwhile, despite being alerted to the issue, the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA), which, among other things, is tasked with protecting citizens from unlawful billing, seems to be taking a lax…

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Tauseef H. Farooqi, the chairman of the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA), said on Wednesday that in line with the initial estimates the rate of charging an electric car should be Rs47 per unit, Daily Times reported. while winding up the meeting held to fix the charging rates, the chairman said that the Authority would like to hold more such meetings soon turning to all those who have been affected by this decision. He further said that people could send their proposals to NEPRA concerning the fixation of the…

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The Antarctic has registered a temperature of more than 20C (68F) for the first time on record, prompting fears of climate instability in the world’s greatest repository of ice. The 20.75C logged by Brazilian scientists at Seymour Island on 9 February was almost a full degree higher than the previous record of 19.8C, taken on Signy Island in January 1982. It follows another recent temperature record: on 6 February an Argentinian research station at Esperanza measured 18.3C, which was the highest reading on the continental Antarctic peninsula. These records will need to be…

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