Himalayan News Service

Kathmandu, June 7:

Vice-Chairman of the Council of Ministers Dr Tulsi Giri today stressed on the need of strengthening the grid among the South Asian countries for promoting regional power trading.

He also suggested energy experts to extend the grid to Middle and Far East Asia. “Further extensions of this grid to the east and to the west will connect the Middle East and the Far East thereby creating an international electrical highway spanning the three continents of Asia, Africa and Europe in future,” he said. He was addressing the sixth international conference on development of hydropower - a major source of renewable energy today. Around 300 participants from over 15 countries participated in the three day event in which over 60 papers were presented by various experts.

“What we need is an integrated regional approach to realise this vast potential for the benefit of the individual country and the region as a whole,” he added. Dr Giri further said that public-private partnership and regional cooperation in this context shall be a productive strategy in alleviating hurdle in development perspective. Dr Janak Lal Karmacharya, the president of International Association of Electricity Generation Transmission and Distribution and managing

director at Nepal Electricity Authority said that a greater reliance on renewable energy sources such as hydropower would significantly mitigate climate change, adding that one of the most important challenges that humanity would have to cope with during the century is climate change.

“The exploitation of hydropower is limited to 22 per cent of its potential in Asia and only 7 per cent in Africa, creating a huge task of harnessing huge portion of this natural resources for the benefit of the people in the developing countries,” he said. Ken Ohashi, the country director of the World Bank reiterates the banks commitment to finance huge hodropower projects in the future. He further said that Nepal should learn some lessons from countries like Bhutan which has made considerable achievements in limited time span on hydropower development. R Taylor, the executive director of International Hydropower Association, said hydropower has become the most essential part of the world’s power trade which is both environment friendly and renewable.