Pakistan's 22 GW Solar Shock: How a Fragile State Went Full Clean Energy (opens in new tab)

It is nice to see good news from time to time. I think the bigger question here is what role Chinese policy is playing in this story. Is their involvement strictly commercial? Have Chinese politicians decided on some sort of Marshall Plan-style approach to the Middle East?

The US has spent decades destabilising this region of the globe. I am hopeful that China and India will want peace and prosperity instead and we're hitting economic tipping points where they are going to start getting what they want whatever it is. The US isn't in a position to cause as much trouble now if the Chinese military thinks their western flank needs to start calming down.

Off-topic, but the image captioned "Including workers in traditional dress handling solar infrastructure" looks AI generated. The workers on the extreme left and right are standing on solar panels, and the one in the centre is holding some metal bars that merge Escher-like with the panels behind him.

Even the caption sounds like part of an AI prompt to generate the image.

We setup a solar on in our home in Pakistan back in 2023. Our primary driver was cost since it was getting extremely expensive during summers when the ACs were on. We expected to get the return in 4 years but inflation went so high in subsequent years that it took just 2 years.

The author of this article appears to be unaware that very high electricity prices have been the other key driver behind Pakistan’s solar boom along with the massive reduction in the cost of solar panels.

This was covered recently in a great interview with two Pakistani renewable energy experts on the Volts podcast: https://www.volts.wtf/p/pakistans-solar-boom

I found some reasonable sources:

https://ember-energy.org/data/chinas-solar-pv-export-explore... has charts for countries (and regions) that go to middle of 2024.

https://ember-energy.org/data/china-solar-exports-data/ has the raw data, which shows 2194.236922MW of installation in pakistan in _just Jan 2025_.

This is just China export data, based on the assumptions that: the country importing is actually installing this, and that .cn is 80% of the market, so it is a good proxy.

Good job to whoever is importing this!

> Battery storage is the next act, mostly in the form of hybrid inverters and lithium-ion packs tucked into homes and businesses.

That should go in parallel if they don’t want experience grid faults.

The main reason for this is the exhorbitant cost of Energy in the country - apart from the constant 6-8 hrs powercut even in the urban centers.

I have seen videos where a layman, who earns around 20-30k a month is slapped with a 32k electricity bill. I am not sure if a layman with means of this level is adopting Solar, but surely anyone else with the money to afford it will. Mostly because it makes economic sense.

That would make a majority of the solar farms built and operated by chinese companies? And wouldn't that essentially make CCP in charge of a considerable part of Pakistans energy sector?

This is fascinating. As the article says, sometimes the most unglamorous things can be among the most interesting.

This model was copied from the state of Gujarat in India

I can't take this article seriously:

1. Uncanny slop "photo" of people installing panels, not even labeled as generated. There is zero excuse for this.

2. No links to sources. Either they are lazy or just making things up.

3. Wild swings in context and sloppy usage of terms like "producing electrons". A sloppy style can be fun to read, but it doesn't work here because it is applied inconsistently.

I'd like to read an article on solar in Pakistan, but this source is no good. The whole site is suspect when this article is tolerated on it.

If a 1000W panel is 4 square meter, that is cracy amount of square kilometers.