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Pakistan is facing an annual electricity shortfall of 5000 MW since 2005 due to lack of effective planning on harnessing indigenous energy resources and dependence on imported fuels. In this regard, a qualitative analysis is presented to address the ongoing energy crises and to suggest the development of domestic energy assets and recommends a policy framework to meet electricity goals. Status of energy in Pakistan is presented in the context of energy supply and demand and discusses the major issues such as electricity theft and circular debt. The reasons are identified for power system degradation, energy crises and their potential impacts on the economy of Pakistan is discussed. Further, domestic energy assets are evaluated for their capacity of power production, including solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, tidal, hydro, coal, and natural gas. The main variables of Pakistan’s energy status are power system restructuring, power system planning and policies, electricity theft, energy crisis and circular debt. The key challenges for policy development are also addressed using possible approaches and used these approaches as input in making policy framework by considering the domestic energy resource through incorporating the policy actors, policy criteria, and policy tools. It is found that Pakistan has a renewable potential of 3425.796 GW and a non-renewable potential of 104.883 GW to meet the future energy demand. It is suggested to exploit domestic energy assets for power production, optimize energy planning and policy to find a secure and sustainable energy option for Pakistan.

The power sector of Pakistan is facing many issues such as departmental mismanagement, huge dependence on imported fossil fuels, the greater cost of power generation, lower production of energy along with old monitoring and controlling mechanism equipped with outdated devices. These all issues are responsible for energy crises in the country for the last two decades. The motive of this paper is to implement a smart grid model as per National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) interoperability (protocols and standards, release 4.0) in Pakistan's electric network for the efficient management of an integrated energy system. In this regard, discusses the current condition of Pakistan's power sector for smart grid integration. Issues and challenges are presented for smart grid deployment with possible approaches to tackle these problems. Implement smart grid model and its synopsis with the help of available smart technologies and energy resources that are responsible to interconnect the power sector organizations and national power system. The implemented model and its synopsis are evaluated using SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threads) and STEEPLE (Social, Technical, Environmental, Economic, Political, Legal, and Ethical) analysis. In this paper, the authors find the smart grid as the best option and shows that how smart grid technology can be implemented in Pakistan and how this technology can manage the integrated energy system efficiently.

Pakistan has been in severe energy crises since the year 2004. Major reasons behind energy crises are lake of use of modeling tools in power planning and policy development, dependence on imported energy sources and poor governance. In this paper, electricity demand forecasting for Pakistan up to the year 2030 and a proposal for utilizing domestic energy resources such as coal, natural gas and solar resources available in Baluchistan province of Pakistan for the electricity needs of the country are presented. Long-range Energy Alternative Planning (LEAP) software is used to develop energy demand model for Pakistan that forecast energy demand under two scenarios, i.e., baseline scenario and energy conservation scenario for the period from 2018 to 2030. Electrical power generation capacity of coal, natural gas and solar resources is also calculated considering the capacity factor of each type of energy asset in MATLAB software. This work suggests that Pakistan's energy demand forecast is 399 TWh under the baseline scenario and 312 TWh under the energy conservation scenario. The power generation potential of domestic energy assets available in Baluchistan is 500.041 TWh in total, which includes Natural Gas 392.768 TWh, Solar 84.935 TWh and Coal 22.338 TWh. This research would help relevant government departments in Pakistan for power capacity development as per the required energy demand and alleviate energy crises in Pakistan.