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.
Taking on the US x Saudis via a state that the Western audience traditionally considers terrorists, scammers and hackers via a soon to be eco-friendly Proxy is quite clever ...
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.
The caption for it is "ChatGPT generated panoramic Photo of a Pakistani factory rooftop covered in solar panels Including workers in traditional dress handling solar infrastructure"
Solar: only when sun shines.
Peak power needed: in the morning.
Best storage: water dams
In Pakistan there is no big grid to allow feeding solar back to pump water up. But the small e-rollers don't need much. This works fine enough, locally.
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 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.
I think the main point of this article is that none of this is happening in a centralized, coordinated fashion. This is mainly folks slapping solar on any building with a roof, with the government helping out a bit on the regulatory side.
It does eventually need to be coordinated to avoid grid issues, but given the massive increase in battery manufacturing (and cost decreases) battery deployment is likely to happen at a lightning pace over the next 3-4 years.
The article seems unrealistically favourable to Pakistan's government eg:
>Pakistan’s energy transformation didn’t happen in a vacuum—it’s part of a broader pivot toward climate consciousness that has taken root in both policy and politics...
whereas in reality solar's taken off because the government is incompetent at providing electricity so people get their own panels. From wikipedia:
>Following 2022 dearth of imported LNG in Pakistan, the country indicated it would quadruple its coal power plants, which use domestic coal
Doesn't sound very "pivot toward climate consciousness" to me.
Generation and storage definitely should go hand in hand, but I think the Pakistani authorities' desire is simply to have something better than the alternative of not having it. At least Pakistan has plenty of hydropower installations that could potentially be adapted to act as energy storage.
Either local solar panels, grid power, or a combination of both, yes. And of course solar panels can also indirectly "store" power by simply reducing demand on hydro resources during the day, allowing water to back up for night-time use.
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?
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.
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.