Pakistan

Having been four days touring Pakistan. Lahore, Islamabad and now Karachi.

Impression: much better than expected. I believe media has exaggerated the problems and issues as they normally did: bad news is good news.

I was thinking that dress code would be similar to middle eastern countries for women. But it is not. It is modest and moderate. Still, the atmosphere of male dominated society is there. I just realised how nice to have a mixture of female and male chatting and socialising in every corner of jakarta. Could not stand a boring picture of a hotel lobby full of men in Islamabad. Even PIA cabin crew are men!

Talking about the cities, as my Indian colleague says, Lahore is comparable to Chennai, Islamabad with Delhi and Karachi with Bombay. But I got tired of eating bryani and curry. I miss my morning ritual of papaya chunks with lime juice.

How dirty is our electricity grid?

Karachi, August 29, 2007

Everytime my night flight approaching any airports, glimpse of scatterred lights always strikes me: How human spends millions and billions of joules to generate electricity. How millions and billions of carbon are produced from those energy mix.

Most of the time we took it for granted.

Based on facts:

Energy mix of java-bali grid in Indonesia contributes to about 0.75-0.8 ton of CO2/MWh. in India, the national electricity grid has the emission factor of 0.81 ton of CO2/Mwh, while is Pakistan is about 0.43 t of CO2/MWh. Difference lies in higher coal consumption of Indonesia and India in energy mix for power generation while cleaner electricity (of course, in terms of lesser carbon emissions) in Pakistan is due to their high consumption of natural gas.

And do you know that:

Laos produces 98% of their electricity by hydropower? this creates a low electricity emission factor for sure.

Vietnam has almost 52% of of their power generation by Hydro and it was estimated that their electricity emission factor is about 0.62 t of CO2/MWh.

Isn't it interesting to see mapping of electricity emissions all over the world?