Majendie is a senior editor for Bloomberg in Singapore.
Mangi covers the Pakistan economy in Karachi.including an investigation by the National Accountability Bureau,
which also probed two coal-power projects.
Like all solar plants, the one at Quaid-e-Azam is at the mercy
of environmental whims, such as variations in sunlight. It faces
particular challenges as well, including the frequent dust storms
off the Cholistan: If the panels aren’t regularly cleaned, the accu-
mulation of dust can drastically slash the plant’s average power
output. According to local media reports, doing the job could require
up to 10 million liters of water a year—enough to meet the annual
needs of 9,000 people. Shah says the panels only need to be cleaned
about twice a month to meet company benchmarks.
In contrast to the stuttering start of Pakistan’s renewable
ambitions, the view of the future from the Thar coal mine is one of
confidence. “When people talk about coal plants getting shut down
or people moving away from coal, they don’t understand what’s
happening,” says Ahsan Zafar Syed, chief executive officer of Engro
Energy Ltd., the Pakistani company leading the project. “Coal plants
that are getting shut down have outlived their useful life. As I speak,
there are 26 countries in the world where coal power plants are
being constructed. They are everywhere.” —With Dan Murtaughgroundbreaking ceremonies over the decades without ever scoring
enough financing to proceed.
Meanwhile, Pakistan is pursuing renewable options that
require less startup capital. The government of Prime Minister
Imran Khan has set a 2030 target to generate 30% of the nation’s
energy from large hydro plants and another 30% from other renew-
able sources that currently supply only about 4%, including arrays
of wind turbines springing up along the coast in Jhimpir.
At the forefront of that plan is the Quaid-e-Azam Solar Park
in the Cholistan Desert. Originally envisioned as a 1GW plant, it
is also backed by Chinese money and technology. The first 100MW
started flowing to the grid in 2015, and a contract for the remaining
900MW was awarded to a unit of Chinese telecommunications
giant ZTE Corp. with the aim of completing the project by 2016.
But the park has been dogged by controversy—over the award
of the contract, allegations of misappropriation of funds, and ques-
tions about its efficiency. So far, ZTE’s Zonergy Co. has added only
300MW after the government reduced the price it agreed to pay
for the power. Syed Faizan Ali Shah, Zonergy’s deputy general
manager for marketing and technical sales, says expansion stalled
because the government changed the way it sets prices, which have
fallen from 14¢ per kWh to about 6¢ since 2015. Scrutiny of past
deals increased after the Khan government came to power last year,
At the Sachal Energy wind farm in Sindh province, a worker washes solar panels for a water filtration plant that’s part of the projectVOLUME 28 / ISSUE 4 71