Afghanistan – Energy deprived country or is it?

It goes without saying that today the one thing preventing Afghanistan from gaining economic stability after war is the lack of energy. It is hard enough to convince investors to invest in Afghanistan for all the obvious reasons. Those that are willing to take a risk and want to go ahead with investments to help rebuild Afghanistan become hesitant when they find out that there is no energy available to meet their needs. This mean that they will have to invest in energy production equipment on top of their original investment.

Afghanistan currently does not have enough electricity to even supply big cities. Let alone big cities, not even the capital Kabul. The residents of Kabul get four hours electricity in 24 hours. What happens for the rest of the hours? Those who can afford it use electric generators, which run on petroleum fuel of one type or another, which costs a lot of money to buy and run.

But is there really no energy available in Afghanistan? Well as we have already been discussing electricity let’s concentrate on electricity, just one type of energy that Afghanistan is deprived of. The answer to the question is no. Afghanistan has possibilities of generating electricity in abundance. We can generate 3.6 giga watts of electricity from our geo-thermal resources alone, which is enough to supply all of Afghanistan’s residence and industry to some extent.

The mountains provide us with the perfect spots for putting up wind power generators. The waterfalls for hydro-electric generators are perfect locations for dams and not to forget the abundance of sun shine that we are blessed with for solar power.

If we can fit the roofs of houses with solar electricity generators then the residential electricity problem is solved. The UK government pays a grant for 30% of the cost to install such roofs and that is where you hardly see any sunshine. If they can make it with so little sunshine then we can do it with sunshine in abundance. The rest of the energy can then be available to supply to industry and even to export.

Can you imagine just how much of an impact it would have on our economy by just utilising this one type of energy resource!

So what is preventing this? Well many things, the war for a start, the money and the manpower. However the biggest factor hindering us is the lack of manpower. We just don’t have enough educated/trained people to carry out the task. Money problems could easily be solved, as many investors would happily invest in something promising like this.

Keeping in mind that it will cost us in multiples of the original cost by bringing in people from abroad to carry out these tasks for us. To install such power plants is not going to be a new invention but we do not have the equipment and the material to build it with. So we will need to import them to start with anyway, which raises costs again.

So what do we do now? Educate ourselves.. Yes, as simple as that. If we can’t build these power plants now, we should at least be able to do so in 10 years time.

It will be possible but we have to get our priorities right. Put education first, do it yourself, promote it amongst your family and friends and ask them to do the same. It is never too late for getting more education. In fact, the education process never ends. If you know something, then teach others. It will help you polish up your skills along the way.

We would not be in this state, if our parents were half as convinced that education is good for us as they are about getting married.

Our country is blessed with natural resources and our people are blessed with sharp minds. All we need to do is put our minds in to work and utilise the natural resources. We will never hear again that we are short of energy.

The foundations and resources to restore Afghanistan are there, but they need to be build upon and utilised appropriately to achieve sustainable progress.