Bangladesh

To understand how terrifyingly close Bangladesh’s energy infrastructure is to total collapse, look no further than the panic that gripped the Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission (BERC) over the last 24 hours. The 2026 global fossil fuel crisis has finally cornered policy managers. Trapped by volatile liquefied natural gas (LNG) markets and an unsustainable reliance on imported liquid fuel, the state-owned Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) let generation costs balloon past a staggering Tk 143,000 crore. As the bleeding worsened, the World Bank stepped in with a blunt mandate: execute aggressive subsidy cuts immediately or kiss future fiscal cushions goodbye. With a gun to its head, BERC pulled the trigger on June 3, blindly passing production costs down the grid with a massive, flat tariff hike. What followed was institutional whiplash. Faced with immediate public fury and the sudden realization that they were about to trigger mass economic destabilization, the regulat...