Ameera Haidar
Freelance Architect
The opinion piece under review, Sajed Kamal (2026) in The Daily Star, argues that Bangladesh possesses vast and largely untapped renewable energy potential, that global fire and warming trends make an accelerated transition urgent, and that the country should adopt what its author calls an emergency action plan toward one hundred percent renewable power. It is a passionate call to action written by a longtime renewable energy educator, and it succeeds as advocacy. As analysis, however, it falls well short of the rigor the subject deserves, and its gaps are worth examining in detail.
The Persuasive Frame Substitutes for a Quantified Model
The article’s central claim, that Bangladesh is an untapped renewable energy mine, rests almost entirely on qualitative description. Coastlines, sunlight hours, biomass availability, and a comparison of solar radiation levels with Germany are offered by Kamal (2026) as evidence of potential, but potential in the abstract is not the same as a costed, technically modeled pathway.
A genuine assessment of whether one hundred percent renewable power is achievable would need to specify grid stability requirements, storage capacity needed to cover nighttime and monsoon season shortfalls, land use tradeoffs in a densely populated delta, transmission infrastructure costs, and a realistic multi-dependent investment schedule. None of this appears. The piece instead moves from an inventory of technologies, an extremely long list spanning agrivoltaics to solar powered space stations, to a rhetorical conclusion that the potential is therefore obvious. A list of applications elsewhere in the world is not evidence that those applications are financially or logistically viable in Bangladesh specifically.
Selective and Unverifiable Citation of Sources
Kamal (2026) invokes an MIT professor’s estimate that capturing 0.07 percent of solar energy could meet global demand, references reports from Berkeley’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and cites Bangladesh’s current renewable share as 2.3 percent of grid supply.
None of these figures are linked, dated precisely, or explained in terms of methodology within the article itself. A reader cannot verify whether the cited reports address Bangladesh’s specific grid constraints, whether the 2.3 percent figure comes from the Power Division, the Sustainable and Renewable Energy Development Authority, or an independent estimate, or whether the studies mentioned considered cost of storage and transmission losses at all. Citing prestigious institutions by name lends authority without providing the substance that would let a reader judge whether that authority applies to the claim being made.
Absence of Any Serious Cost or Tradeoff Analysis
A formal energy transition assessment weighs costs against benefits over time, accounting for capital expenditure, subsidy burden, foreign exchange exposure for imported components, and the fiscal capacity of the state making the investment. Kamal (2026) does not attempt this. The article criticizes the previous government’s ten percent by 2020 target as a gross underestimate and criticizes the current strategy’s twenty percent by 2030 and thirty percent by 2040 targets as insufficiently ambitious, but offers no quantified alternative target grounded in an actual capacity buildout plan. Calling for an emergency acceleration without specifying what percentage growth rate, what annual investment figure, or what sequencing of technologies would be required turns an energy policy question into a slogan.
Treating Political and Industrial Resistance as Bad Faith Rather Than Structural
The piece attributes continued interest in coal, imported gas, and small modular reactors to ignorance or denial, and describes clean coal and small modular reactors as obsolete technology sold with a new facade.
This framing, as presented in Kamal (2026), forecloses a genuine analysis of why these paths remain attractive to policymakers. Bangladesh’s energy planners face real short term grid stability constraints that intermittent renewable sources have not yet solved at national scale, existing long-term contracts and sunk infrastructure investment in gas and coal capacity, and pressure from trade relationships, including the gas import arrangements tied to the trade deal the article itself criticizes. Dismissing these considerations as self-contradiction skips over the actual political economy that any serious transition plan would need to navigate and neutralize.
Why Institutions Rather Than Opinion Columns Should Carry This Analysis
A newspaper column, even a well-researched one, is structurally unsuited to settling a question of this scale, and that includes this very critique. What the subject actually requires is a formal techno economic assessment produced or commissioned by a body with statutory authority and technical capacity, such as the Power Division, the Sustainable and Renewable Energy Development Authority, the Power Grid Company of Bangladesh, or an independent body like the Power and Energy Regulatory Commission working alongside development partners.
Such an assessment would need modeled grid simulations, sensitivity analysis on cost assumptions, and transparent methodology open to peer review, none of which a persuasive essay like Kamal (2026) can provide regardless of the author’s expertise or sincerity.
Political and Industrial Barriers to Transparent Assessment
The deeper problem is that such rigorous official assessments, even when they exist internally, are rarely published in full or with methodology intact. Energy planning in Bangladesh intersects with politically sensitive contracts, foreign government relationships tied to fuel imports, and domestic industrial interests invested in existing coal and gas infrastructure.
Full disclosure of cost assumptions, contract terms, and capacity planning models would expose those relationships to public scrutiny in ways that current and past administrations have generally preferred to avoid. The result is a public debate conducted through advocacy pieces such as Kamal (2026) and government press releases rather than through published, technically defensible planning documents, leaving citizens to choose between industry funded skepticism of renewables and advocacy driven optimism about them, with little independently verified ground between the two.
What Better Analysis Would Look Like
A stronger treatment of this subject would present modeled scenarios with explicit assumptions, disclose the methodology and funding sources behind any cited studies, quantify the storage and grid investment needed to manage intermittency, and treat resistance to renewable transition as a set of structural incentives to be addressed rather than a failure of understanding to be scolded. Until Bangladesh’s energy authorities commit to publishing that kind of assessment openly, columns like Kamal (2026), however well intentioned, will continue to substitute conviction for the rigorous public accounting the country’s energy future requires.
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