Anyone involved in photovoltaic power exploitation knows the rule: Push it too hard and it breaks. That’s what seems to be happening in Pakistan right now.
For years, the country has been lurching from one electricity crisis to another. A decade ago, failure to foresee the precipitous decline of domestic gas fields led to widespread power outages. Beginning in 2013, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government built a fleet of Chinese-financed coal plants to fix the problem. The cost of all that, plus imported coal and liquefied natural gas to power all those fossil turbines, helped send the rupee tumbling and forced a round of bailouts from the International Monetary Fund.
Over the past year, the government of Shehbaz Sharif (Nawaz’s brother) has been raising energy prices in an attempt to patch the gaping budget hole. That has added more pain to a struggling population. As Bloomberg News recently reported, with rates rising by 155 percent since 2021, many households now spend more on their electricity bills than on rent.
Protests against the price hike last month paralyzed a major access road to the capital. On Sunday, Maryam Sharif, Nawaz’s daughter and chief minister of Punjab province, where half of Pakistan’s population lives, announced a 45 billion rupee ($162 million) subsidy program to soften the impact of the prices.
What all the politicians have failed to do is give Pakistan the affordable, clean electricity system its 240 million people need if they are ever to close the widening economic gap with other emerging economies. Faced with the skyrocketing costs of a barely functioning power grid, households and businesses have begun to opt out. Clean energy has been the main beneficiary.
A recent study by BloombergNEF analyst Jenny Chase illustrates the extraordinary scale of this unrecorded boom. Last year, $1.45 billion worth of solar PV panels were exported from China to Pakistan. That’s enough to buy about 6 gigawatts of modules — enough to provide about 7.0 percent of Pakistan’s electricity. About the same amount was imported in the first six months of this year alone. With cell prices falling over the past year, that now represents something closer to 13 GW of PV.
Separate evidence from machine learning processing of satellite images suggests that huge amounts of panels are going unnoticed. The area of ??arrays visible from space amounts to a minimum of between 1.4 GW and 2.8 GW, BloombergNEF found. Much of it appears to be built on factory rooftops, for industries to self-consume. Chase estimates that a total of 12.7 GW was installed by the end of last year, with another 10 GW to 15 GW to be added by 2024, making Pakistan the world’s sixth-largest solar market.
The official numbers couldn’t be more different. The country’s electricity regulator lists just 0.6 GW of solar nationwide, and its long-term baseline plan is for a cumulative total of just 5.5 GW in 2034. Even its most optimistic “high demand” scenario only raises that estimate to 15.6 GW, 10 years from now, a level the country has likely already surpassed, according to BloombergNEF estimates.
From one perspective, this looks like a success story. Faced with a corrupt, incompetent, and authoritarian government that forces them to pay more than they should for dirty, unstable fossil energy, households and businesses are voting with their feet for a cleaner alternative. We have already seen in South Africa how quickly this dynamic can stabilize a collapsing power grid. Yet it would be much better if people were not forced to take such measures. Pakistan’s power system is already underfunded. The more large consumers abandon the grid to generate their own power, the more the remaining costs will be imposed on those who cannot do so – mostly poor households who have no roof space for panels. That will only amplify the vicious cycle of rising prices, lower reliability, and unpaid bills.
By News Desk, thenews.co
