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Oh LOOK at all the solar panels on roofs in this industrial area in Pakistan!
(It's not the Barents Sea, Google Maps just switches longitude and latitude for some reason).
Anyway the answer to the question 'why do you think there is lots of solar in Pakistan when official stats say there isn't" is a. customs data and b. I can see it from space.
Wow here the text on Google Maps is showing up in Cyrillic script.
I am so glad I am not involved with making maps.
Btw Pakistan's power grid is 46 gigawatts, serving 236 million people. The US has 333 million people and a power grid of about 1,300 gigawatts.
Pakistan imported about 13 gigawatts of solar modules in the first half of 2024.
I worked with Atlas (https://atlas.co/) to use their SolarEye machine learning program to find solar rooftops in Pakistan. It found 443 projects occupying 27 million square metres, but visibly missed many more than it found.
What it does confirm is that the projects are clustered in industrial areas, and are therefore probably on the roofs of factories with little involvement with the grid.
Pakistan's energy regulator, NEPRA, notes that power consumption is down 9.1% year on year in 2023. NEPRA attributes the drop mainly to high power prices cutting economic activity and making residential consumers curb consumption, with rooftop solar only a third factor.
But NEPRA doesn't know how much solar the country has, either. We think it has about 12.7GW of solar already (compared with 50GW on-grid power capacity) and will add 10-15GW of solar in 2024.
This makes Pakistan the world's sixth-largest solar market in 2024, which is just wild.
(This is meant to be paywalled but the map is being spread around X, it's just that nobody on Mastodon can afford us).
Also, working with Atlas was great, best machine learning firm I have worked with to detect solar panels (and I've worked with a few, which was disappointing).
The results weren't *precise* (I think it missed 2-3x as many as it caught, and detected nothing small) but it's a problem where some answer is better than none, and at least Atlas was efficient and their interface was really good. This is, alas, not a problem worth $$$$ to anyone.
@solar_chase As I am sure you know, this is because electricity prices have almost tripled in Pakistan over the last two years, making (tax inclusive) consumer electricity rates some of the highest in the world.
But increased solar is reducing grid demand which in turn is driving up grid pricing even more because electricity plants capital debt payments are indexed to capacity rather than production.
A bad pickle to be stuck in.
@solar_chase I intended to ask a question. Are other poor developing countries facing or will face similar debt payment issues as demand shifts from grid to rooftop solar?
@abdullahkhalids Not an expert on this, though I do remember reading about Pakistan's rather odd decision to pay generators on a capacity rather than a generation basis.
But honestly, given rising power demand, rising supply is likely to have to more upside than down for the economy as a whole.
@solar_chase @abdullahkhalids I don't know the details of Pakistan's pay-for-capacity plan, but versions of that (buried in rather complicated regulatory schemes) also exist here in the United States (or so I think, like I say we have a very complicated system of how power generators get paid and I am only dimly familiar with the details).
@soaproot @solar_chase The essential difference is that while debt of plants in both US and Pakistan in denominated in USD, Pakistani consumers pay in Rupees. So the Pakistani debt is actually paid using USD from exports.
This causes all sorts of economic issues, if not well handled, or when fuel prices suddenly shoot up, as they did two years ago.
@abdullahkhalids @solar_chase It is a pickle if you are operating the electricity grid, for sure. Whether it is a pickle for people in Pakistan who want electricity is a bit more complicated. We have a somewhat similar situation here in California, USA, where there are now very strong incentives to install batteries if you are doing rooftop solar, which isn't exactly off-grid but will change electricity markets if this gets adopted widely.
@solar_chase Would the IEA not be open to at least partial funding of such a study, under ‘infrastructure market growth monitoring’ or whatever label unlocks some money?
@BashStKid I guess that's up to the IEA.
There's also the legitimate question of "does knowing about it help". My clients are mainly interested in this from a perspective of global solar module demand, how that impacts the supply: demand balance for solar modules, and what it might do for prices (not much, there are still oodles of solar modules for the foreseeable future).
@solar_chase If it’s not the Barents Sea, why did you post a link to the Barents Sea?
@rvedotrc it's not a link to the Barents Sea.
@solar_chase Well, it depends which device you open the link with. It is indeed the sea, on iOS, it seems.
Anyway:
https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?params=31_23_50_N_74_22_30_E_scale:25000_region:PK
There you go.
@solar_chase The link you posted includes in the URL "74°22'30.0"N 31°23'50.6"E"
which is ... presumably not what you wanted.
@rvedotrc so on my devices, the link goes to the right place (near Lahore) - it's just labelled wrong in the image description. And also, for some reason, labelled in Cyrillic.
It is, of course, coordinates 31°23'50.6"N, 74°22'30.0"E.