A surprise solar boom reveals a fatal flaw in our climate change projections

Solar is surging, but so is humanity’s energy appetite. We need better models.

by Noah Gordon and Daevan Mangalmurti

Dec 1, 2024, 5:00 AM CST

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/388506/solar-energy-power-projections-climate-change-pakistan

When the satellites zoomed in, you could see the panels gleaming from space. Pairing images taken miles above the Earth with Chinese customs records, BloombergNEF solar analyst Jenny Chase and her team discovered this year that the rooftops of homes and factories across Pakistan are blanketed with solar panels. Catching their own government by surprise, Pakistanis have been installing a massive amount of solar power.

In the process, Pakistan has gone from an inconsequential solar market to the sixth-largest in the world. The country of 242 million has a power grid with a peak capacity of 46 gigawatts — that’s less than 4 percent of the US power supply for a country with more than two-thirds as many people. In the last three years, Pakistanis have imported more than 25 gigawatts of solar panels from China. This disorganized, bottom-up boom has increased Pakistan’s power supply by 50 percent.

The solar surge is driven by high local electricity costs. At 16.6 cents per kilowatt-hour, Pakistan’s electricity rate for businesses is 37 percent higher than its neighbor India, and more than double the average rate in Asia. Agreements made in the 1990s have kept the state stuck in expensive contracts with independent power producers, and power plants burn lots of liquefied natural gas, which became costlier after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. That same year, Pakistan fell into a foreign exchange crisis as the country’s dollar reserves plunged, which made everything more expensive.

All of this opened an opportunity for businesses and better-off Pakistanis to begin importing solar panels from China, which can pay for themselves in as little as two years and free their users from the expensive, unreliable grid. The middle class has started to do the same. The state has come under pressure to raise rates for the conventional grid to satisfy its contracts with power producers — which the increasingly shrinking, poorer customer base struggles even more to afford. Consumers who have made the switch to solar panels, like the owner of a factory that makes soccer balls in Sialkot, told the Financial Times, “Allah has given us this gift to get out of this mess.”

But there’s a bigger story here, beyond one nation’s problems with its power grid. What’s happening in Pakistan is the latest sign that energy authorities are underestimating how much clean power the world demands — and that energy models can suffer from the same biases as their makers. Those failures in number-crunching are not merely abstract. Failing to grasp how much energy is wanted, and the things people in places like Pakistan might be willing to do to get it, leaves the world unprepared to build, fund, and plan for a cleaner future.

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