“If you come here after one and a half years, you will see a river of
solar panels, residential buildings and offices — it will be a new
world,” said site engineer Muhammad Sajid, pointing towards the surrounding desert.
This is big news for a country suffering from chronic energy
shortages that leave people without power for large chunks of the day on
a regular basis. And then there’s the nearly half of the households
that aren’t even connected to the grid, according to a World Bank study. When temperatures soar in the summer, electricity demand can fall short by around 4,000 megawatts.
At the inauguration, the prime minister said
“the dearth of electricity has pushed the country backwards and its
entire industry and agriculture sector have suffered immensely.”
Pakistan is one of the most vulnerable
countries in the world to the impacts of climate change due to its
location, population, and environmental degradation. A recent study
in the journal Nature Climate Change found that people are already
migrating out of the Pakistan for climate-related reasons such as
flooding and heat stress, which have negative effects on agriculture and
can prove very costly.
“We need energy badly and we need clean energy, this is a sustainable
solution for years to come,” Imran Sikandar Baluch, head of the
Bahawalpur district administration in Punjab where the plant is located,
told
the AFP. “Pakistan is a place where you have a lot of solar potential.
In Bahawalpur, with very little rain and a lot of sunshine, it makes the
project feasible and more economical.”
At a meeting shortly after the inauguration, Sharif approved
expanding the project from from 10,000 acres to 15,000 acres and
increasing the capacity from 1,000 megawatts to 1,500 megawatts.
No comments:
Post a Comment