Bangladesh has attained an outstanding success in the field of green energy as it secured second position in producing renewable energy (RE), especially off-grid solar solutions.
“Bangladesh is now generating 630.96 megawatt (MW) electricity from renewable sources of which 397.03 MW power come from solar system,” State Minister for Power, Energy and Mineral Resources Nasrul Hamid told BSS here on Monday.
He said the government has developed power generation strategy based on fuel diversification to enhance energy security.
According to REN21’s Renewables 2020 Global Status Report (GSR) published recently, Nepal topped with 11 percent access to electricity from off-grid solar solutions, while Bangladesh and Mongolia jointly ranked second position with eight percent power from the same sources.
“One successful business model for the deployment of off-grid solutions is the concept of peer-to-peer electricity trading or ‘swarm electrification’, which had been tested among rural households in Bangladesh,” the report said.
In the wake of the extraordinary economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts energy-related CO2 emissions are expected to fall by up to 8 percent in 2020, it said.
The Renewable Energy Policy obligates the renewable energy share to be 10 percent by 2020 that means it would be 2,000 MW, according to Sustainable & Renewable Energy Development Authority (SREDA).
According to the Ministry of Power, Energy and Mineral Resources, there are 5.5 million cumulative installations of Solar Home System (SHSs) in predominantly off-grid areas in the country, making it the largest off-grid RE programme in the world.
It said projects having generation capacity of 653.2-MW renewable energy are under implementation, while a plan has been taken to produce 1,487-MW power from RE in the country.
Besides, different ministries and departments have taken initiatives to generate 248.29-MW power from renewable energy.
The GSR said growth in renewable power has been impressive over the past five years. But too little is happening in heating, cooling and transport. Overall, global hunger for energy keeps increasing and eats up progress.
The government introduced net metering system to encourage RE based electricity generation in the country. Net-metering can potentially drive widespread implementation of distributed generation by incentivizing end-users to adopt localized power generation through RE technologies such as solar, wind and biomass.
