3 Ways to Talk About Your Big Idea Without Giving It Away

Your idea is brewing in your mind. You’re excited and motivated to get it out there, but you need to be careful not to give it away to other people. Our ideas are very much like babies. We need them to grow and flourish, but we need to protect them until they’re stronger. Having said this, you still need to get feedback from many people. How do you do that?

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How to get 5-10 billion dollars to invest in power generation and solve the load shedding problem in Pakistan.

 

Two days ago, after listening to Nawaz Sharif's press conference, I started thinking about the challenge of addressing circular debt and at the same time have money invested in addressing power shortage in Pakistan. Mr. Shahbaz Sharif has provided some good ideas to deal with the problem in the short-term and here is a plan that I believe could work in the long-term and address many problems, including corruption, while raising money and creating jobs.

 

Please do leave your comments on where your find weak areas and what strengths do you see in this plan. It will help in improving my initial thoughts. Based on your feedback, I will improve this idea further.

 

If you like this plan, please share it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks.

 

High-level plan:

1. Separate electricity production from distribution
2. Divide the whole country in 1,000 sectors or distribution units of 100GWh each with the freedom to buy their electricity from any power generation company
3. Invite companies from all over the world to bid for leasing different sectors and getting exclusive distribution rights. Expected average bidding of $10 million per sector, generating $10 billion in total
4. Announce the privatization of all government-owned thermal power stations in three year. Set efficiency and productivity improvement targets for existing thermal power stations owned by the government and offer job protection after privatization if they achieved those targets.
5. Dissolve WAPDA completely and form a new publicly-owned corporation to run the hydro-electric and nuclear power generation units and sell their production to all the distribution companies
6. Auction all WAPDA-owned thermal power generation units to highest bidders in a transparent manner
7. Make one large grid management company that would only manage electricity transmission between power generation units and sectors
8. Switch to private distribution and private power production within four years

 

Some critical success factors that I think are important to consider:

1. Bring some good planning minds together to make a sound plan and realistic timeline. Incentivize these minds based on the overall success of this plan instead of high consulting rates.
2. Make every potential bidder to pay $5,000 to $10,000 as a tender fee. This will raise enough money to fund the whole process
3. Identify consumption growth potential per sector to make sure the government gets a better deal on high-growth sectors
4. Make sure that local partnerships are encouraged
5. Pre-select 25-50 technology consulting companies to offer billing and consumption monitoring systems and make distribution companies use any of these companies for their technology needs
6. Keep the entire process transparent
7. Baseline current distribution cost per KWh and cap the profits for distribution companies with incentives on efficiency improvements
8. Publish average production cost per KWh on an ongoing basis and offer subsidies on generating electricity through renewable sources so that they can compete with fossil fuel power production
9. Guarantee a healthy return on investment with 7-15 years of operations
10. Make electricity theft a serious crime
11. Slowly increase the selling price of hydro-electric power and invest surplus money in subsidizing generation through other renewable sources

 

Benefits of this plan:

1. No money needed to implement this plan because all management cost will be covered by the $10-$20 million of expected income from tendering process
2. Short-term incentives to thermal power generation units to improve their productivity
3. Reduction in bureaucracy
4. Competition between power generation companies to reduce the cost per KWh
5. Ongoing income to the government by selling hydro-electric power
6. Reduced dependence on fossil fuels
7. The whole process can be implemented in five years so the current government can fully implement it and take credit

 

About me:

I led the development of a computer simulation model for ABS Power Generation, which was the second Independent Power Generation project proposal in Pakistan after Hubco. Power Generation, especially through renewable sources, is a topic of personal interest but I don't consider myself an expert in this field.