Pakistan's solar panel boom

A grassroots revolution has helped Pakistan pull off one of the fastest solar revolutions in the world. Even as the nation "grapples with poverty and economic instability", it imported 17 gigawatts of solar panels in 2024, more than double the previous year, said CNN.

Solar power is the third-largest source of renewable energy globally, behind hydropower and wind – but it's the fastest growing. And nowhere is that boom more in evidence than in Pakistan.

'Perfect storm'

Pakistan's solar panel boom is the result of a "perfect storm" of factors, Waqas Moosa, chair of the Pakistan Solar Association and CEO of Hadron Solar, told CNN. One significant reason is the rise of electricity costs, which have "shot up" 155% over the last three years. Chinese "overproduction" of solar panels has also "lowered costs", said the World Economic Forum, turning Pakistan into the third-largest destination for Chinese exports.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Although the Pakistani government has tried to claim credit for the uptake of solar, it has been "very bottom up", Mustafa Amjad, from the Renewables First think tank in Islamabad, told CNN. Demand from "the people" has pushed markets to import more solar panels.

For some analysts, Pakistan's embrace of solar power "undermines an increasingly popular narrative that clean energy is unaffordable, unwanted" and only possible with "large-scale government subsidies". And for those living in the country, it offers a respite to expensive and often unreliable energy supplied by the traditional power grid.

Grid obsolescence

But the solar revolution hasn't come without its costs. The "flight of affluent Pakistanis" towards renewable energy has dealt a fresh blow to those relying on "pricey" conventional sources of power, said Reuters. Electricity companies who have "lost their most lucrative clients" have been forced to "additionally hike" costs to their "shrinking pool" of customers.

Most of the nation's solar panels aren't connected to sell excess capacity to the grid, meaning that the "benefits of cheap and reliable power aren't widely shared", and the "struggling urban middle class" have been "left out".

The sheer speed of the boom means it was "probably the most extreme" solar revolution to have happened in "any country in the world" in 2024, energy analyst Dave Jones told DW's "Living Planet" podcast.

But "you need to make sure that it happens in a sustainable way for the whole of the system". Otherwise, there's the risk of a "blanket ban on any more solar coming in", something that has already happened in other countries faced with a disruptive solar boom, like Vietnam. "You just turn off the taps and it stops," he said.

But the story of solar in Pakistan, particularly the way that uptake has been "driven primarily by market forces and with minimal political support", still holds "valuable lessons for other emerging markets", said the World Economic Forum.