Myanmar’s goal of achieving a 100 per cent electrification rate by 2030, with 20 per cent of energy from renewable sources, is achievable but several hurdles need to be tackled first, energy experts have said.
At the Myanmar Green Energy Summit 2016 last week, panellists agreed that hydroelectricity, plus wind and solar energy, were good choices given available resources.
Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi told China’s premier on Thursday that her new government is willing to look for a resolution that suits both countries to a suspended Chinese-funded hydropower project in northern Myanmar, a senior Chinese diplomat said.
Finding a solution to the US$3.6 billion Myitsone dam project is important for Suu Kyi who needs China’s cooperation in talks with Myanmar’s ethnic minority armed groups operating along northern borders with China.
President Htin Kyaw on Friday formed a new commission to evaluate all proposed hydropower projects on the Irrawaddy River prior to their going ahead.
The committee formation comes a week before State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi’s trip to China as Burma’s foreign minister.
Since the installation of the National League for Democracy (NLD) government in April, China has been lobbying for the resumption of the multi-billion dollar Myitsone Dam, which was being constructed with Chinese backing just downriver of the confluence that forms the Irrawaddy, in Kachin State, prior to a government suspension order in 2011.
While neighboring Thailand’s Special Economic Zones are now progressing without much public consultation or review, Myanmar may be moving in the opposite direction. Its three SEZs which were launched in the waning years of the junta, are now under the direction of the civilian government fully aware of concerns raised by communities and independent researchers, and inclined to take stock of what their predecessors set in motion. At issue are a whole range of social and environmental grievances, as well as the viability of the projects themselves and to what extent they reflect the new leadership’s priorities.
The Chinese will certainly lobby on the suspended Myitsone dam project during State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi’s visit to China, Kyaw Zeya, director-general of the Foreign Affairs Department under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told a press conference.
Officials from the ministry, the Electric Power and Energy Ministry and the Border Affairs Ministry held a press conference on their undertaking in their first 100-day plans under the new government at the Information Ministry in Nay Pyi Taw.
Development of the second stage of the country’s first economic zone will begin with infrastructure including roads, electricity and water, said U Myint Zaw, general manager of Myanmar Japan Thilawa Development Limited.
“We will implement Zone B in phases. Once one phase is complete, we will start on the next one,” he said.
Meanwhile the smaller Zone A is around 90 percent complete, with US$760 million in foreign investment committed to the project across 400 hectares of land. The project is located to the south of Yangon.
Myanmar’s new government has announced ground-breaking reforms to its $31bn (£23.7bn) jade industry in a move campaigners claim could signal “a new era of fundamental change” in a business long dominated by abuse, corruption and cronyism.
The decision to freeze any renewals of existing jade permits, and to suspend the licensing of new ones, follows a series of deadly landslides in resource-rich Kachin state, widespread protests against lack of regulations, and extensive NGO and media reports exposing social and environmental abuses in Myanmar’s jade trade.
The government is planning on reviewing the status of dams throughout the country to see if they are worth keeping. U Htun Win, deputy minister for agriculture, livestock and irrigation, told parliament on August 2 that the review would take into account the efficiency, cost-effectiveness and long-term benefit of the dams.
A shift in policy, away from building dams and toward running irrigation channels to farmland, has already led to a 50 percent cut in the request for irrigation funding next year. The ministry’s assistant secretary, U Myo Tint Tun, told The Myanmar Times on July 18 that expenditure in 2017-18 would be less than half of this year’s level, falling from K253 billion (US$216 million) to K120 billion. The funds would be used primarily to provide irrigation drainage to existing dams that lacked it.
As a voracious consumer of Myanmar journalism over some time, I am fascinated by how the country’s transition to freedom of the press takes root and prospers.
Progress toward press freedom has occurred very rapidly in Myanmar since 2012, but we still see too many instances of journalists being detained and even charged over what they have published.
The investors behind Myanmar’s first special economic zone will start accepting proposals for factories in second zone known as “Zone B” at the end of the rainy season, as both phases of “Zone A” near completion, with US$760 million in foreign investment committed to the project so far.
Myanmar Thilawa SEZ Holdings chair U Win Aung told The Myanmar Timesthat the first zone, covering 400 hectares, is almost finished. Seventy-three foreign investors from 16 countries have agreed to invest in the project, which is located in Thanlyin township, around 25 kilometres (16 miles) south of Yangon.
