First the bribe, then the solar lamps

Shazia Khan (no relation), an environmental lawyer in Washington, D.C., who has worked with the Global Environment Facility on energy issues, is also familiar with the difficulty of doing clean energy business in her native Pakistan. 

After she raised more than $125,000 to purchase and distribute 10,000 solar lanterns in the wake of Pakistan's devastating 2010 floods, Shazia Khan said she found customs officials were perfectly willing to let millions of people suffer in darkness until they got their cut. 

Refusing to pay a bribe,Standard seamroofclamp replacement bulbs.Modern leddimmables online for sale. Khan, who said, "I felt like I was in a Kafka trial,With industrial-inspired energymonitor and hanging lamps in a range of sizes and styles." flew back to Pakistan from Washington, where she spent a week going from office to office, crying, threatening and pleading to allow her lanterns through. 

Her ordeal finally ended, she said, when the head of customs at Karachi airport decided to sign off on her shipment -- not because he sympathized, but because he was annoyed at having to leave his air-conditioned office.these proven front load commercial industrialextractores deliver ease-of-use, Khan said that despite good work by agencies like the Alternative Energy Development Board, government attempts to spur clean energy have been fragmented at best. 

"They always feel they have bigger fish to fry," she said. "What we need is the lighting of a fire, trying to create a business model that works." 

Yet in a perverse way, some clean energy leaders say, the government's inability to deliver reliable power to citizens is helping their business. Naghman Khan said he is getting calls nonstop for solar roofs -- and is currently developing an industrial-scale biogas plant in the city of Multan in Punjab province to serve steel and textile mills as well as dairy farms. 

"There have been so many power cuts over the last few months. I've just been inundated with homeowners and businesses, and even schools,Protect your vehicle and produce power with a washerextractorrs." he said. "People here are so fed up that they're not even waiting for the government to catch up. They're investing themselves, they're teaming up and arranging the leasing. They're just moving ahead." 

Despite the challenges, he said he is optimistic about the future of clean energy development in Pakistan. 

"I think the prospects for renewable energy are very bright," he said. "There's a lot of challenges, a lot of obstacles and a lot of frustrations, but there's a lot of genuine people who want things to happen." 

Bikash Pandey, director of clean energy at Winrock International, said Pakistan lags in clean energy development compared to neighboring Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. He blamed a mix of government confusion and intrusion and said successful household renewable energy markets are thriving in places where the government sets rules and provides incentives, but then stays out of the way. 

In Bangladesh now, he said, the government provides wholesale microfinance for the household solar system market, which has scaled up to a sale of more than 500,000 systems annually. 

"It just goes to show you that if you can align the policies, absolute income is not the major determinant," Pandey said. "Pakistan has quite a large population that could afford these systems, but they don't have the numbers because the government role is not aligned here." 

Companies like Khan's, he said, "could be doing a hundred times more business than they're doing now if the government would be clear about the rules."