Comment by Riaz Haq on June 24, 2024 at 10:06am

Illuminating Pakistan: Leading solar provider commit to dig deep PV market--China Economic Net



http://en.ce.cn/Insight/202405/31/t20240531_39022443.shtml

LAHORE, May. 31 (Gwadar Pro)– “Today, LONGi’s footprint in Pakistan is around 5GW. I believe we are well positioned to seize such an opportunity to further our efforts towards a green future for Pakistan.”

In recent months, clean energy has experienced a new period of rapid growth, with global renewable energy capacity increasing by 50 percent in 2023 compared to the previous year. Pakistan is committed to becoming an important renewable energy development hub in South Asia and the entire Asian region, and is vigorously promoting green transformation at the national level.

As report goes, the Sindh government lately announced to provide solar systems to 200,000 households across the province, including 50,000 homes in Karachi. “A total of 6,656 solar systems will be distributed in each district of the province,” the Director of Sindh Solar Energy has confirmed. Ali Majid, Pakistan General Manager of leading solar solutions provider LONGi, believes that it is undoubtedly good news for Pakistan’s photovoltaic industry, specifically, for Chinese PV companies that have been deeply involved in the local market.

The systems will include solar panels, charge controllers, and batteries. Currently, Sindh generates 400 megawatts of electricity from solar energy. This project is expected to significantly increase solar power generation in the province.

“Nestled in a region blessed with ample sunlight, Pakistan boasts approximately 2.9 million MW of solar power potential,” Ali told in an interview with Gwadar Pro. “And while the initial cost of solar technology has been a deterrent, the decreasing global cost is making it more economically viable for Pakistan.”

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Pakistan - Renewable Energy

https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/pakistan-renewable-...

According to National Electric Power Regulatory Authority’s (NEPRA) 2022 yearly report, Pakistan’s total installed power generation capacity is 43,775 MW, of which 59% of energy comes from thermal (fossil fuels), 25% from hydro, 7% from renewable (wind, solar and biomass), and 9% from nuclear.

Wind data, provided by Pakistan's Meteorological Department, measures Pakistan's coastal belt at 60km (Gharo-Keti Bandar) and 180km long, with an exploitable potential of 50,000MW of electricity generation through wind turbines. Currently, 36 private wind projects are operating, producing approximately 1845MW.

Small hydropower projects are mainly located in remote areas of Pakistan particularly the North of the country. Recently, the GoP has identified new generation requirements by capacity, fuel technology, and utilizing indigenous resources for power generation by announcing the Indicative Generation Capacity Expansion Plan (IGCEP). This plan aims to add 13,000 MW of hydropower capacity to the current 9000 MW capacity by 2030.

According to the Private Power & Infrastructure Board (PPIB) of the Ministry of Energy, seven solar projects of 530 MW are operational and supplying electricity to the national grid.

With the rising costs of electricity in Pakistan and an unreliable grid supply, more industries and commercial organizations are turning to captive solar solutions. There has been a strong surge in domestic installation of rooftop photovoltaic panels in larger cities. For projects under 1 MW, net metering regulations came into effect in September 2015. The current state of the energy sector is promising for growth in solar power in the future. given rising fossil fuel prices.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 24, 2024 at 10:14am

New players eye Pakistan’s growing hybrid, electric vehicles market

https://www.dawn.com/news/1827302

As the auto market continues to grow in Pakistan, new players are setting their sights on introducing hybrid as well as electric vehicles (EVs) in the country, and one of the largest automakers has announced its entry into Pakistan.

The BYD Group of China has recently announced its entry into the passenger vehicle market in Pakistan in collaboration with Mega Conglomerate Pvt Ltd, the parent company of Hub Power and Haleeb Foods.

During a signing ceremony recently held in China, Aly Khan, executive director of Mega, highlighted plans to promote EV adoption in Pakistan.”

He stated that three BYD showrooms would be established in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad in 2024. The move is expected to accelerate the electrification of Pakistan’s automotive industry, which has largely been based on petroleum fuel.

Meanwhile, a senior official of the Ministry of Industries and Production said that BYD and Mega have not applied for the licence to establish an assembly plant in Pakistan. It is more likely that the company and the local partner would import the vehicles into Pakistan, as other EVs, including some European brands, are being sold in the country.

There are several models of EVs and hybrid electric cars in the country, but currently, only the Indus Motor Company is manufacturing a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) — the Toyota Corolla Cross, while two new entrants are assembling hybrid vehicles.

Ali Asghar Jamali, chief executive officer of Indus Motor Company, said that the auto sector was transforming towards reducing dependency on fossil fuels, which was especially important in countries where petroleum fuel was imported.

However, Mr Jamali added that, considering Pakistan’s current energy landscape, there are challenges in introducing battery electric vehicles (BEVs), as there is heavy reliance on petroleum fuel, which hinders the immediate adoption of BEVs.

“The HEV technology presents a practical and efficient solution in the current scenario, as electricity and electric chargers are not available everywhere,” he added.

Possibly due to these infrastructure hurdles, mostly related to the lack of charging ports and continuous availability of electricity, the National Electric Vehicle policy introduced in November 2019 has failed to attract any single four-wheeler EV assembler in the country.

Responding to the query, Asim Ayaz of Engineering Development Board, an attached department of the Ministry of Industries and Production, said that 34 licences have been obtained by two and three-wheeler manufacturers.

He acknowledged that issues related to the launch of EV vehicles in the country, such as the lack of financing for customers as EVs are more expensive due to the higher cost of batteries, but added that the ministry is proposing to have an EV charging station at every gas station to enhance the availability of charging options.

Two local players, Haval of Sazgar Engineering Works Ltd, and Hyundai Nishat Motors, are already assembling hybrid vehicles, while the third local player is also set to enter the non-conventional vehicle market of Pakistan on a larger scale.

Since they have the grace period up to June 2026 under the Greenfield option, these companies were only assembling vehicles in the country.

Apart from cars, Sazgar is a key player in manufacturing electric auto rickshaws in the country, and in late 2022, Haval introduced Pakistan’s first locally assembled hybrid electric vehicle. Later in October 2023, Hyundai Nishat introduced its hybrid car.

On the other hand, MG Pakistan has decided to enter the market on a larger scale with all three categories of the new energy vehicle (NEV) class.

These include hybrid vehicles that have inbuilt charging, the other category is the plug-in charging where the vehicles operate on fossil fuel and have the option for plug-in charging too in case of fuel shortage, and the third category is the electric vehicle.

Comment by Riaz Haq on August 19, 2024 at 8:46am

K-Electric to Double Pakistan's Solar Energy Capacity in Next 2 Years

https://propakistani.pk/2024/08/19/k-electric-to-double-pakistans-s...

K-Electric Limited plans to add 640 megawatts of clean energy to its portfolio within the next two years which would double Pakistan’s solar energy capacity, reported Bloomberg.

Chief Strategy Officer Shahab Qader Khan said the bidding process for this begins on August 19 (today) and will close next month. The projects will include 200 megawatts of hybrid solar wind generation.

Solar energy makes up just 1 percent of the national energy mix, and K-Electric wants to alleviate some of the prevalent burden of electricity bills on residential consumers by reducing the country’s dependence on expensive fuel imports.

Looking ahead, K-Electric plans to add 1,200 megawatts of renewable energy over the next five years, while scaling back on costly energy sources like liquefied natural gas and fuel oil.

Pakistan currently faces high electricity costs due to heavy reliance on fossil fuel imports. It is pertinent to mention that monthly power bills have surged by 155 percent since 2021 and now exceed rent expenses for many households across the country.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 5, 2025 at 7:36pm

Pakistan’s 22 GW Solar Shock: How a Fragile State Went Full Clean Energy - CleanTechnica

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/04/pakistans-22-gw-solar-shock-ho...


It’s more solar than Canada has installed in total. It’s more than the UK added in the past five years. And yet it didn’t make a blip in most Western media. While the U.S. continued its decade-long existential crisis about grid interconnection queues and Europe squabbled over permitting reforms, Pakistan skipped the drama and just bought the panels.

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How does a country once considered a textbook fragile state leapfrog into solar hyperscale? You can’t make sense of it without going back two decades. In the early 2000s, Pakistan was better known for insurgencies and instability than infrastructure upgrades. Terror attacks were frequent, electricity shortages were the norm, and governance was, to put it kindly, patchy. Political cycles flipped with the military’s mood, floods battered the countryside, and inflation hollowed out public services. Not exactly the backdrop for a clean tech success story.

But something changed. Slowly, unevenly, Pakistan started building institutional muscle. The terrorism that plagued the country for over a decade was brought under control through a combination of military operations and negotiated truces. Civilian governments, for all their dysfunction, managed peaceful handovers of power. The technocratic class—policy analysts, engineers, civil servants—began steering the country toward energy pragmatism. It wasn’t a revolution. It was governance on hard mode, with better outcomes.

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This isn’t just a solar story, though. Wind has been building quietly in the south for years, especially in the Gharo-Jhimpir corridor. Hydropower continues to play a big role, and bagasse from the sugar industry chips in some renewable electrons too. Battery storage is the next act, mostly in the form of hybrid inverters and lithium-ion packs tucked into homes and businesses. They aren’t grid-scale yet, but they’re everywhere you’d want resilience—factories avoiding outages, households tired of flickering bulbs. The pieces are in place for a distributed energy system that doesn’t wait for the grid to catch up. Which is good, because Pakistan’s grid is not remotely ready for this volume of variable generation. Utilities are already reeling from the revenue shock as high-value customers opt out of dependence. No one likes selling electrons when your best clients are making their own. That looming utility death spiral? It’s not theoretical in Lahore or Karachi.

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Pakistan’s electric vehicle transition is picking up momentum too, driven by a mix of foreign investment and homegrown innovation. Chinese companies have taken the lead in setting up large-scale operations, with firms like BYD announcing plans to open a production facility in Karachi and the ADM Group committing $350 million to build EV manufacturing capacity and install thousands of charging stations nationwide. These moves dovetail with Pakistan’s goal to convert 30% of all vehicles to electric by 2030.

But the real action is happening closer to the ground, where indigenous startups are rolling out electric two- and three-wheelers at a pace that could reshape urban mobility. Companies like Jolta Electric and Vlektra are assembling locally made e-motorcycles that target the country’s massive base of two-wheeler users—millions of whom rely on scooters and bikes for daily transport. With soaring petrol prices and worsening air quality in cities like Lahore and Karachi, these electric alternatives are fast becoming the obvious choice. The economics are simple: lower fuel costs, less maintenance, and in many cases, the ability to charge with rooftop solar. While car-scale EV adoption remains limited, the grassroots uptake of electric bikes and rickshaws—many of them assembled in Pakistan—is proving that the EV revolution here will likely be led from the bottom up.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 22, 2025 at 9:51am

Pakistan Oxygen to Build $4.6M Hydrogen Facility at Port Qasim

https://fuelcellsworks.com/2025/04/22/green-investment/pakistan-oxy...


The company stated the new facility “will strengthen our position in the hydrogen market and provide efficient, reliable gas solutions to key industrial clients.” The project is also expected to play into wider trends of decarbonization and energy diversification as industries seek lower-carbon inputs.

This development adds to the region’s momentum around hydrogen infrastructure. Just 70km away, Oracle Power has been working since 2021 on a proposed 400MW green hydrogen facility in Thatta, Sindh. While a final investment decision has been delayed, Oracle has completed feasibility studies and signed agreements with China Power to move forward with development and operations.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 2, 2025 at 9:41am

Chinese battery glut plugs into solar boom to power Pakistan

https://www.ft.com/content/2b4c598e-a4b3-4c6e-9c38-97e46357f819

The combination of a glut of lithium, a key battery material, and overcapacity of lower-tier China-made batteries has created a flood of cut-price battery energy storage systems for lower-income countries such as Pakistan. Lucky is investing roughly Rs1.5bn ($5.3mn) to convert a rubble-strewn site into a 20.7MW unit supplied by the world’s biggest battery maker CATL, which can hold enough energy to power up to 20,000 homes for an hour. The battery energy storage system will be Pakistan’s largest to date, Lucky said. “A price collapse in wind, solar and batteries has made the payback periods very competitive,” said Hassan Mazhar Rizvi, the factory’s general manager for power generation. “This will ensure smooth operations, and increase our solar and wind portions.” Chinese solar panel prices have plummeted in recent years as the cost of electricity from Pakistan’s grid has surged, prompting the country of 240mn people to import solar panels with the capacity to generate about 19GW last year, according to Jenny Chase, BloombergNEF lead solar analyst. Pakistan is still buying panels that collectively could generate 1GW to 3GW a month this year, she estimated, enough to power a city of millions. The battery storage system will help factories to more cheaply extend their operations beyond daylight hours and scale back the use of fossil fuels, compensating for reliability issues from the grid’s renewable sources. For households, hooking up to a battery is a way to store enough energy to cope with spontaneous blackouts and avoid higher rates for energy from the grid during peak usage times in the evenings. “The limit on the [solar] boom was always likely to be the number of daylight hours,” said Chase. “Larger solar systems are useful, because as well as meeting instantaneous demand they can charge the battery for later.”

“Customer interest has gone through the roof,” said Mujtaba Haider Khan, chief executive of Reon Energy, a Karachi-based renewable energy and battery company. Reon’s energy storage systems, including the one purchased by Lucky, mix predictive software, CATL-made batteries and mostly Chinese-origin solar and wind technology, and can boost a factory’s clean energy usage and cut fossil fuel energy waste, said Khan. “Companies can now recover their investment in transitioning to predominantly renewable energy — using solar, wind and batteries — in less than two years.” The battery storage systems are still too expensive to be adopted as widely as solar has been in Pakistan in the near future. But distributors say prices are falling rapidly and demand continues to grow. Faaz Diwan, director at Karachi-based Diwan International, one of Pakistan’s largest solar and battery distributors, said the cost of the BYD batteries he sold had fallen by more than a third since last year to about Rs275,000 for a 5kWh unit that is enough to power a small house. His company has been importing more than 500 batteries a month since March, three times more than last year, as wealthier households, gyms, mosques and businesses gobble up storage systems to save money on air-conditioning ahead of summer.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 2, 2025 at 7:25pm

Arab News Pakistan

@arabnewspk
#WATCH: Fisherman Abdul Ghani from a coastal village in Pakistan’s Sindh can now “catch good fish” using solar kit provided under World Bank-backed initiative.

For families like his, solar power is transforming life along the country’s southern coast. https://arab.news/cdkg7

https://x.com/arabnewspk/status/1929704592293454188

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Lit by the sun: How solar power is transforming lives along Pakistan’s southern coast

https://www.arabnews.pk/node/2603057/pakistan


Some 50,000 families in Sindh’s five coastal districts are set to receive solar kits under the World Bank-backed initiative
Project aims to add 400 megawatts to the national grid, 270 megawatts of which will facilitate consumers in Karachi


SUJAWAL, Sindh: Holding a battery in one hand and an LED light in the other, Abdul Ghani waded through the salty waters of the Arabian Sea to reach his small wooden boat.

It was just past sunset, the sky dimming fast, but Ghani had no fear as he had light.

Ghani is one of hundreds of Pakistani coastal residents who have benefited from a green energy initiative under the World Bank-backed Sindh Solar Energy Project (SSEP), a multi-component program that aims to bring sustainable power to over 1.2 million of the southern province’s poorest and most energy-deprived people.

While torches don’t offer adequate visibility in the vast seascape, and boat generators scare fish away when powered on, the battery-powered LED lights from the home energy system have proven to be an unexpected boon for nighttime fishing for residents like Ghani.

“Earlier, I couldn’t catch any fish, but now when I go fishing using these lights, by the grace of God, I catch good fish,” the 45-year-old fisherman from Karo Chan, a coastal village in Sujawal district located in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province, told Arab News.

“This helps me support my children and manage our livelihood.”

The project targets people either without any electricity or facing power cuts, identified through Pakistan’s national poverty scorecard, a data-driven assessment tool used to identify and prioritize assistance for low-income households.

“Each family has a solar system with fans, three LED light bulbs, mobile charging facility, along with a charge controller and a battery package,” Mehfooz Ahmed Qazi, the project director, told Arab News.

“All these cost Rs6,000 ($21), ten percent of the actual price, to instill a sense of ownership in the users.”

Qazi said the project, launched in October 2019 and set to be completed in July 2025, had four components: a 400-megawatt solar power initiative for grid integration, rooftop solar systems for public sector buildings including 34 district headquarter hospitals, off-grid solar home systems for poor households and the establishment of solar equipment standardization laboratories at NED University in Karachi and Mehran University in Jamshoro.

The key objective of the project is to promote the potential of green energy across the province.

Out of the 400 megawatts planned for grid integration, 270 megawatts will be added to the system of K-Electric — serving over 3.4 million customers in Karachi and surrounding areas in Sindh and Balochistan — not only increasing the share of green power but also helping reduce electricity tariffs for residents of Karachi.

By the end of the project, 34 megawatts of rooftop solar installations will be set up on buildings across the province, while 200,000 solar home systems will be distributed, benefiting 1.2 million families.

Of these, 50,000 families in five coastal districts, including Sujawal, will receive solar home systems under the third component of the project that started in February this year.

For families like Ghani’s, the change has been immediate and life changing.

“I turn on three lights,” he explained. “When we turn on the lights, small fish come. Seeing the small fish, the big ones also come. Where I place my net, both big and small fish come into it.”

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