Turning Bangladesh’s Energy Crisis into a Blessing

Bangladesh’s energy crisis is costly -- but it could also become an opportunity to create jobs, build technological capability, and develop a globally competitive industry.

For years, Bangladesh has pursued an energy strategy heavily dependent on imported technology and raw energy, while creating an environment conducive to corruption, inefficiency, and guaranteed profits.

The result is a national crisis: The energy import bill has reached a level that consumes as much as 30% of remittance income, yet the country continues to suffer from a chronic and worsening energy crisis.

At the same time, Bangladesh is producing a growing number of university graduates who are struggling to find productive employment. Rather than treating these two problems separately, Bangladesh should connect them.

The energy crisis can be turned into a blessing by engaging the growing pool of graduates in solving it through local innovation, technological advancement, and industrial development.

Here are seven pieces of advice:

1. Focus on energy efficiency in exploration, production, distribution, and consumption through local innovations that can find global markets, much like the way Houston has succeeded in becoming a global energy innovation center. 

2. Upgrade from energy-hungry productive activities to high-value-added, less energy-consuming alternatives, which will also create a market for Bangladesh’s growing number of graduates.

3. Pursue the reinvention of mature air-cooling products and promote lifestyles that require less artificial air cooling, creating opportunities to enter the global air-cooling market while also improving health.

4. Instead of ensuring profits through capacity charges or public-private partnerships, promote fair competition to encourage innovation and efficiency.

5. Remove subsidies from energy so that both consumers and producers can make better, more rational decisions about production and consumption.

6. Instead of deploying engineers to support the installation and operation of imported energy technologies, engage them in technology advancement and innovation in building high-performing firms, as ABB and GE have been doing.

7. Focus on developing a globally competitive, highly innovative energy industry that can address Bangladesh’s energy crisis while exporting innovative solutions, as Denmark has done in wind energy and China has done in solar energy.

Bangladesh should not merely spend more to overcome its energy crisis. It should use the crisis to build the technological and industrial capabilities needed to overcome it -- and turn those capabilities into a new source of jobs, exports, and prosperity.

Md. Rokon Uz Zaman is a Professor at North South University and the Founder of The Waves.