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For Energy Security
The reduction in the prices of some petroleum products early February was not unexpected. While the price increase early January was excessive, people anticipated at least a token reduction after the political change of February 1.
Neither the rise nor the fall in prices, however, provides any long-term solution to the energy insecurity in the country. The phase of the heated debate, normal immediately after such price revisions, is now over, and it is time to think in a cool manner about achieving better energy security.
Induction of the private sector in the petroleum trade is only one part of the solution. As a country without any proven natural reserve of petroleum, Nepal will frequently face energy crisis if it continues to depend solely on petroleum as a modern source of energy. Nepal has to be serious in developing alternate sources.
This obviously leads to the idea of developing hydroelectricity but that is not the limit. The petroleum import bill can be reduced also by developing many other identified sources - ethanol being one of them. Though some discussions were held on this issue a couple of years ago, nothing concrete is learnt to have progressed in this direction. With sugar milling developed as a major industry in the country, Nepal can produce a good quantity of ethanol that can be mixed with petroleum.
Similarly, scientists say that there are varieties of oilseeds, many of them growing in the wild, which can yield petroleum alternates for a number of uses. The researches on them have so far remained fruitless, as they have not been translated into a viable business proposition.
With the growing petroleum prices, there are better chances that hydroelectricity will be cheaper than petroleum. This calls for efforts to not only generate more hydroelectricity but also to conduct research to use it in many non-traditional applications.
So far Nepal is the only place where vehicles operated by packaged electricity are being run commercially. The narrow roads unsuitable for fast speed vehicles grant the opportunity to experiment with such vehicles in real life. Even after so many years of packaged electricity operated Safa tempos (three wheelers) plying commercially on the streets, nothing seems to have been done to change the design of these tempos to improve their efficiency and look.
Will the government together with Nepal Oil Corporation and Nepal Electricity Authority commit some funds and seriousness towards these issues? People may not mind it if the prices of petroleum and electricity are further raised provided such a rise is accompanied by a credible pledge that the extra fund so collected would be used for these purposes instead of distributing bonus to the employees of these monopolies.
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