When the satellites are zoomed in, you can see the panels shining from space BloombergNEF solar analyst Jenny Chase and her team are matching images taken miles above Earth with Chinese customs records. discovered Roofs of houses and factories across Pakistan have been covered with solar panels this year. Catching their own government surprisePakistanis have been A huge amount of solar energy is installed.
In the process, Pakistan has moved from an underserved solar market Sixth largest Its country in the world 242 million It has a power grid with maximum capacity 46 GW — which is less than 4 percent US Power Supply A country of more than two-thirds of the people. Pakistanis have imported in the last three years More than 25 GW Solar panels from China. This unorganized, bottom-up boom increased Pakistan’s electricity supply by 50 percent.
Solar surges are driven by high local electricity consumption. 16.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, Pakistan’s electricity rate for businesses 37 percent more Compared to its neighbor India, and more than double the Asian average. The deal is done 1990s The state has been locked into costly contracts with independent power producers and power plants have burned a lot Liquefied natural gas, which became expensive after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. In the same year, Pakistan Foreign exchange crisis As the country’s dollar reserves dwindled, that made everything more expensive.
All this is an opening chance For business and upscale Pakistanis to start importing solar panels from China, which they can pay very little for two years and free their users from expensive, unfaithful The grid middle class Started doing the same. The state is under pressure raise the rate To fulfill its contracts with power producers for the conventional grid – which increasingly struggles to afford an increasingly shrinking, poor customer base. Customers who have switched to solar panels, such as the owner of a soccer ball manufacturing factory in Sialkot, to say Financial Times, “God gave us this gift to get us out of this mess.”
But there’s a bigger story here, beyond a country’s problems with its power grid. What’s happening in Pakistan is the latest sign that energy authorities are underestimating how much clean energy the world is claiming — and that energy models may suffer from the same biases as their creators. Those failures of number-crunching are not merely abstract. Failure to understand how much energy is needed, and what people in places like Pakistan might be willing to do to get it, leaves the world ill-prepared to build, fund and plan for a clean future.
Why our energy demand estimates are always wrong
History has shown that cheap energy creates its own demand. As steam engines became more efficient in 19th-century Britain, Coal consumption increased. When oil was cheap and plentiful after World War II, people could not enjoy savings. They made more cars. More recently, in 2000, when making an industrialized estimate of China’s electricity demand for 2005, the Energy Information Administration’s estimate was off. 25 percent.
Modelers try to project how much energy will be needed in future years. But these projects often fail to distinguish between how much energy is needed and how much wanted.
In part, about this special Performance Solar, whose growth the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental organization that oversees the global energy sector, has greatly increased Depreciation every year Since 2006 — as it is Countries have their own renewable energy targets. of the IEA Net Zero by 2050 The report, a plan for how to eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the 21st century, was seen as ambitious when it was published. 2021. It calls for the world to add 630 GW of solar power annually by 2030 This is actually proving a very simple goal: the world is already on its way to adding up 600 GW In 2024 – 334 GW in China, 53 GW in the US and, surprisingly, at least 16 GW In Pakistan.
The pattern is that Western energy forecasters are constantly surprised by how much energy people in developing countries will use. As countries like Pakistan become richer, their people are going to demand the same energy-dependent benefits that people in richer countries already do – and our energy forecasts must reflect that reality or we’re going to get it wrong.
A recent projection illustrates the problem. Working with Energy Authority of Pakistan The Danish Energy Agency tested in 2023 How Pakistan’s Power Sector Can Align with IEA’s Net-Zero-By-2050 Pathway It expected Pakistan’s electricity generation to reach about 350,000 gigawatt-hours (unit of energy use over time) in 2045, doubling its 2022 capacity. 173,000 gigawatt hours. But as a result, billions of people living in future Pakistan will carry much less energy than that Texas originated todaywith a fraction of Pakistan’s population.
But that estimate fails to account for Pakistan’s middle class, which is approx 100 million Stronger with millions more on the way out of poverty and joining its ranks. As people get richer, they want — and use — more electricity Today, only 11 percent Pakistani households have air conditioning. On six days this June, when temperatures in the southern part of the country reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit, at least 568 people died In a 3 degree Celsius scenario, we are on track 2100Major cities in South Asia experience multiple heatwaves each year which last on average 23 days – they are almost twice as long as today. Even if the air conditioning is increasing skilledIn a scenario where electricity production is only doubled between now and 2045, a large part of the population will lack protection from the extreme temperatures of the 2040s.
Either Pakistan’s growing middle class will continue to endure heat waves like this year’s without using technology to ease their suffering — or they’ll continue to use much more energy than prominent forecasts for energy consumption. There will be precedent: global demand for energy to power air conditioners and other cooling systems has increased from 300 terawatt-hours in 1990 to 800 terawatt-hours in 2023, a because Why global carbon emissions haven’t peaked yet. Recently in Pakistan Dr Study It found that higher temperatures would help increase electricity demand twice as fast (6 to 8 percent annually) than current estimates. IEA itself once again amended Electricity demand is forecast to increase 6 percentAdding that air-conditioned demand is a key uncertainty.
Energy and climate system models are full of assumptions that often don’t filter through to reading the headline results: some scholars call it “Status Quo Bias“When an energy agency in Paris or Copenhagen believes that the world can reach net-zero with millions of Pakistanis having enough energy to turn their ceiling fans, they set specific limits on how much energy can be installed in Pakistan and how much the Europeans can. Pakistan for Growth Emissions reductions leave space. While ostensibly apolitical integrated assessment models, which assess the economic consequences of climate change, tell policymakers which temperature targets are feasible or desirable, they are also political assumptions. Expressing what is often wrong.
Accepting his Nobel Prize in 2018, William Nordhaus, its godfather Integrated Assessment Model, emphasis that “cost-benefit is paramount [for warming] 3C rise in 2100.” In other words, the most cost-effective outcome of climate change – in terms of how much we spend to stop it and how much it costs – is a rise in global average temperatures of 3°C, double the warming target set in 2015. Paris Climate Agreement (a target world is on the way). But models like Nordhaus’s assume that economic development can protect people from the same economic activity There is a limit to how much the world’s rich countries can reduce their energy consumption (or go green) to curb climate change — and therefore a limit to how much new energy can be allocated to poorer countries and their rapidly developing economies.
The world’s growing middle class isn’t waiting for permission to buy air conditioners. Now the job is to make sure that powers them – and that means having enough solar panels for Lahore and Copenhagen.
