TRANSCRIPT
Music - tense
Shafqat Hussain: In the morning, I was getting ready for the office, (SFX tap running, teeth brushing, household commotion, picking up keys, opening door) I was just about to leave my home. And then suddenly - we experienced this electricity cut down (SFX power outage).
And I called these electricity company guys (SFX call), their helpline, and they said ... there is an issue in your area, some big power cables are burnt out (SFX power cables sizzle, pop) and we are going to fix them and it will take a little time.
I said, how much time? They said two to three hours. I said, okay, then I left them, and I went to office (SFX hustle and bustle).
And around four o'clock, I got a call from my wife (SFX smartphone ringing) and she said that mother is not breathing well. And she is suffocating. And I am rushing her to the hospital (SFX ambulance).
Music – urgent
I left my office (SFX rushing, traffic) and I rushed to the hospital where they went. (SFX hospital). And then when I saw her... she was almost... She can't breathe properly. She’s sweating.
And then they put some oxygen on her (SFX oxygen machine) and then some medications. She lived at the hospital for two days to recover.
It’s a very terrible day for me. Because of this electricity failure, we almost lost our mom.
Shafqat Hussain lives in central Islamabad, Pakistan - with his mum, his dad, his wife and three kids. He remembers this summer's day pretty clearly for two main reasons. The first one is because his dear 70-year-old mum, Saira, nearly died after they lost power for 28 hours.
Shafqat Hussain: In summertime, in June and July, sometimes it goes to 42 to 43 degrees. And you know, when you are at home, these all, you know, cemented walls, and then the heat outside in the scorching sun, it's very difficult to survive in there.
With no respite from the humid, hot air, Saira couldn’t cool down in the extreme summer heat and eventually struggled to breathe.
Shafqat Hussain: When you don't have any electricity around, forget about the air conditioning. Your fans are not working. You don't have refrigerators on. You don't even have any cold water to drink.
The second reason this day was memorable is - this was the day Shafqat decided enough was enough.
Each day, he’d go to work worrying if his family might have to sit at home in the dark, unable to work, to study, to use basic home appliances, even to turn on a fan to survive a summer's day.
He had an idea. Something his colleague had mentioned and that he’d seen advertised on the telly.
Television ad
It was time to take the leap. All he needed was the cash.
Shafqat Hussain: It's difficult to afford sometimes because it's almost 200,000 rupees.
200,000 Pakistani rupees is about 720 US bucks. Shafqat decided to ask his boss at the marketing company where he heads logistics if he could loan the money. They agreed.
Shafqat Hussain: And then, now they are just deducting from my salary in every month basis.
Soon after that, Shafqat went ahead with his plan.
Shafqat Hussain: Because there is no alternative in this country!
And a matter of months later, his home was powered by the sun that had almost killed his mum months earlier.
Shafqat Hussain: Because it's your own and you're getting your energy from the sun and once it's done, it's installed, at least you don't have any worries behind, that if I'm not home, the kind of experience I faced could happen again... so now, it’s, you can say, a kind of sense of safety.
Shafqat’s story is one of many millions in Pakistan and other energy-poor regions beyond, where a regular electricity supply is truly a luxury. But he’s also part of a growing trend of people taking matters into their own hands. And tapping into a different power source.
Across Pakistan, a quiet but rapid solar power revolution is currently playing out.
Dave Jones: “This is probably the most extreme that has happened in any country in the world with the speed that has happened through this year.”
Over the course of 2024, Pakistan will install an estimated 15-20 GW2 of solar power. That could be almost half of its entire generating capacity. If that figure doesn’t quite resonate with you - putting it plainly, it’s absolutely heaps.
Azeem Azhar: “It's really crazy. It is so, so remarkable!”
Solar panels have suddenly become so cheap, more people than ever around the world can afford them.
Azeem Azhar: “It is transformative and it's affordable.”
For people whose energy is erratic, expensive and hard to come by, this is especially transformative. And it’ll transform the climate, too.
You're listening to Living Planet. I’m Charli Shield.
A little while back, energy analysts noticed something weird in the data they were combing through.
Pakistan’s national electricity grid data that is. There seemed to be a huge drop in demand for electricity. A drop of 10 percent since 2022. For a rapidly growing country of 250 million people, where the economy has also grown by 2 percent in the past two years, that just didn’t seem right.
Dave Jones: You just wouldn't expect that of an emerging country.
Dave Jones is one such energy analyst who was pretty puzzled by this trend.
Dave Jones: I work at a research organization called EMBER and I track the global electricity transition, heading up our global insights team and I'm based near London in the UK.
Dave and his team realized that just looking at Pakistan’s national grid data wasn’t going to give them all the answers. Because the electricity was coming from somewhere else.
It was coming from rooftops. Rooftops like Shafqat’s. And that kind of solar electricity generation wasn’t being captured in national statistics. It wasn’t really being recorded anywhere.
Dave Jones: And we heard stories about a lot of solar being deployed. So that's when we thought, right, there's probably a hole in the solar data here.
So, first things first, when you’ve got a hunch it could be solar, but there aren’t many hard datasets around, head to Google Earth to see for yourself.
Dave Jones: Oh my God, I had a lot of fun going through Google Earth! It was really hypnotizing just floating around and being able to see all of these solar panels from the satellite images that they have. And it's not on one or two houses in certain areas, like whichever urban area you went to, whether it was a house or block of flats or whether it was a factory or government building, you could see those solar panels on the image everywhere.
I had a look too, and Dave’s right, float over Islamabad Larkana, Lahore... and you’ll see the unmistakable little checkered grids atop homes, businesses, buildings big and small, left, right and center.
Dave Jones: It was unbelievable. Just the amount of solar panels on so many buildings spread throughout the whole of the country.
But how to find out just how much solar had made its way to Pakistan?
Dave Jones: Tracking how solar is developing and being deployed in different parts of the world is extraordinarily hard. A lot of the government stats are really delayed or even non-existent.
The renewable shift is happening so rapidly and, sometimes, randomly, most governments can’t track how much power is coming from where quickly enough to crunch official statistics.
There is one country with a very useful, up-to-date dataset though.
And that is China. The world’s number one manufacturer of solar PV modules.
Dave Jones: We also track the Chinese export agency data, which tags the solar panel exports for every country in the world up to the latest month. So really up to date data for over 100 countries across the world, and specifically in the case of Pakistan, it revealed that Pakistan was the sixth biggest installer of solar panels across the world. Which is quite a surprise!
The sixth biggest installer of solar panels in the world in 2024. That’s behind much bigger, much richer economies like China, the US, Germany, India and Brazil. And, obviously, ahead of nearly 190 other countries. That is huge news for Pakistan.
And the reason that can even happen of course is because of the incredible drop in the price of solar technology.
Dave Jones: It's come to that point now that for daytime electricity, it is a no brainer for people in Pakistan to go out there and to be doing this on the scale that they're doing it.
The price of solar PV modules has plummeted by 90% in the last 15 years alone.
In 1975, solar panels cost a bit more than $100 US bucks per Watt. By 2011, that dropped to $2 per Watt. And in 2018, they dipped below 50 cents per Watt.
Over four decades, solar power has gone from being one of the most expensive, out of reach electricity sources to just about the cheapest in most places around the world.
Azeem Azhar: It's really crazy. It is so, so remarkable. And they're progressively getting cheaper.
Azeem Azhar is a tech entrepreneur and an author. He’s based in the UK, where he grew up. And he’s got a lot of family in Pakistan, who he chats to about what kind of energy they’re using, of course.
Azeem Azhar: I'm the founder of Exponential View, which is a newsletter that looks at the rapidly changing technologies, including renewables. And I'm an investor in AI and deep tech and climate tech companies as well.
Nowadays, solar panels are so cheap in some economies, you may as well get some, even if you don’t really need to generate extra electricity, Azeem says.
Azeem Azhar: It was earlier in 2024 that in some countries like the US and in Germany, it became cheaper to buy a solar panel than to buy a fence panel for your garden made out of wood or fake plastic that looks like wood. And so, you started to see the first time in places like Germany people installing solar panels vertically as fencing specifically around balconies.
Now of course the physics of that is that a vertical solar panel doesn't get as much sunlight as one that is sort of horizontal or tilted at an angle points to the sun, but it gets some sunlight and it's cheaper than you're putting a fence panel up, so why not do it and just generate some electricity while you're at it?
And it’s not just Pakistan and Germany cashing in.
Over the course of this year Dave’s energy data analysis team has tracked high numbers of Chinese solar exports to Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, the UAE (United Arab Emirates), Thailand, South Africa and Oman too.
There are also whispers of people-powered solar trends similar to Pakistan happening in Zimbabwe, Namibia and Madagascar.
This rise in renewable energy has big, big implications for ambitious global climate goals. Especially the one to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. Which, until now, based on combined national targets, wasn’t looking like it was gonna happen. But, if on-the-ground solar surges like we’re seeing in Pakistan continue, a tripling could actually be within reach.
Dave says this distributed, people-led solar swell brings good news and not-so-good news for Pakistan as a whole.
First, the good news.
Dave Jones: The electricity is quite expensive for the consumer. So, to be able to buy these cheap solar panels, put it on the roof so you don't need to buy electricity when it's sunny is resulting in a lot of savings for people...
Over the past 3 years, Pakistan’s electricity prices have soared. Rising oil prices after Putin invaded Ukraine, surging tariffs, an over-investment in thermal power plants, and a weakening currency have all contributed.
For most people, it's incredibly expensive alongside being incredibly unreliable.
With solar, Shafqat says his family’s monthly energy bill is about 80% cheaper. And they are no longer afraid their power supply will disappear in the middle of the day.
Shafqat Hussain: Sometimes in summertime, we experience load shedding. In 24 hours, you can say that most of the time, eight hours, no electricity, no power.
'Load shedding’ is when the provider cuts off the electricity in certain areas to balance demand with available supply. This happens a lot in Pakistan, where they often just can't generate enough electricity from the main grid to keep everyone connected 24/7. But it’s just one of many reasons that, all of a sudden, your power might go out and not come back on for hours upon hours.
Shafqat Hussain: Everybody in Pakistan is suffering with this issue of electricity failures. And you know, the system and the infrastructure is so poor and old that most of the time if there is electricity, you have a power failure because of your transformer is burnt out because of overloading, your cables are burnt. After eight hours, you are experiencing three, four more hours of electricity cut.
As we heard firsthand from Shafqat, that can be especially dangerous for people during summer months, where median temperatures hover around 38 degrees Celsius, or 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures that are only increasing as global warming hits hot countries like Pakistan particularly hard - fueling a rise in extreme weather across the country.
News montage – extreme weather in Pakistan and South Asia.
That brings us to another bit of good news from Pakistan’s solar boom: it’s helping reduce the country’s carbon emissions that contribute to global warming.
Dave Jones: It's a good thing in the extent that in the immediate term now there's less coal and gas generation. The solar is doing what you would expect it to do, which is meeting that electricity demand and resulting in less fossil generation from the system.
So, if this solar revolution means fewer fossil fuels burnt, lower emissions, cheaper and more reliable electricity - what could the downsides be?
It’s mainly got to do with the difficulties of integrating this new power with the current system.
Dave Jones: Solar panels are so cheap, it's such an obvious thing to do, but you need to make sure that it happens in a sustainable way for the whole of the system.
One of the main hurdles is that electricity grids are incredibly complex to organize, operate and facilitate... And this solar surge risks disrupting the system Pakistan currently has in place, which could have unintended consequences.
Dave Jones: The bad thing is that the way those power plants were planned and funded was to run a minimum amount of hours. That now means that that electricity and the rest of the hours is coming significantly more expensive and causing problems for balancing the grid more generally.
Because this solar surge has happened so suddenly, the grid system operators haven’t had time to prepare – to figure out what they need to do to integrate this new source of power; what it means for their contracts with fossil fuel suppliers, for the prices they’re charging, for the kind of energy demand they can expect.
Dave Jones: They haven't had time. They didn't expect this to happen at this magnitude. This is probably the most extreme that has happened in any country in the world with the speed that has happened through this year...
If the government perceives the solar boom to be simply too destructive to its current system, Dave thinks it could try to stop it altogether.
Dave Jones: And what really risks happening in Pakistan now is that you have a real blanket ban on any more solar coming in and you just turn off the taps and it stops. And we've seen that in so many countries over and over again over the last decade.
Like Vietnam, for example.
Dave Jones: There was a major surge in Vietnam through 2019. And that caused a similar problem as what we're seeing in Pakistan now. And there was just an import ban.
Something that will really help with the integration of solar energy is battery storage.
Azeem Azhar: The next step will be batteries and batteries are really, really coming down in price. What I would say about my relatives in Pakistan, they do of course have solar panels, but they also still have diesel generators because we haven't yet got the price of batteries down far enough to rely on battery backup. But that will happen in the next few years.
The biggest, most exciting part of this solar revolution, according to Azeem? That soon almost anyone, anywhere could take part.
Azeem Azhar: Until now, if you wanted to get into the energy business, you had to find billions of dollars of capital and do deals with regulatory authorities and deals with financiers and spend several years building a big nuclear power station or a combined cycle gas plant. Very, very few organizations or entities could do that. And then you'd have to find a grid connection for something that's producing, you know, 800 megawatts or whatever it happens to be, you know, it's a huge ask.
Once upon a time, the countries that sat on fossil fuel reserves ruled the energy roost. But wind, water and sunshine are in ample supply all across the world. And now that the tech to harness those sources has improved so much, and regular consumers far and wide can tap into them, we could see some of those old power dynamics start to shift.
Azeem Azhar: I think the precedent to go back to is what happened in the computer industry. So, in the 1970s, in order to buy a computer, you needed a lot of money, and you had to be a big company, and you bought a big mainframe, that meant you needed to have a big building with cooling and lots of space. And we've then got the PC revolution where these modular computers came out, they were much less powerful than the big mainframes, but many, many more people could afford to buy them, and businesses could afford to buy them. And what we saw then was an expansion of computing across our economies and the democratization of that particular technology.
Azeem Azhar: I think it's fair to say that electricity is a precursor to wealth and prosperity, you don't need very much to benefit in the first instance. The first kilowatt of generation you can get in a home that doesn't have electricity, it powers a fridge, it powers an induction hob, it powers an air conditioner or a fan at night, it charges Android devices, it provides light, it is transformative and it's affordable. So, I think that this is an enormous, enormous deal...
SFX Pakistan street
SFX home
Since installing solar on his rooftop, Shafqat could not be happier. It’s certainly no exaggeration to say that it’s transformed his family’s life. So far, Shafqat sees it as a win-win-win. Plus, now he can relax a bit more on the job - and tend to other worries in life.
Shafqat Hussain: I had to, you know, receive these messages and calls from my wife and my mom - fix it, fix it, fix it. We have this problem.... Now we don't have water... Now there is no electricity, so we can't go anywhere because we cannot iron our clothes... And so on and so forth. Now I am easy that, you know, I don't receive any calls from them complaining of the energy problem, haha! A little ease, little ease in my life.
This episode of Living Planet was produced by me, Charli Shield. It was edited by Neil King. Timon Heidorn waved a little magic wand in the studio. If you liked this episode, we would love to know. A rating and review on Apple Podcasts would make us extra happy. Or you can send us an email to livingplanet@dw.com. Let us know what you think, and if there are things you want us to cover. We’ll be back next week with a new episode.