From Newsgroup: soc.culture.china

CNN:

" Pakistan, home to more than 240 million people, is experiencing one of
the most rapid solar revolutions on the planet, even as it grapples with poverty and economic instability.

The country has become a huge new market for solar as super-cheap
Chinese solar panels flood in. It imported 17 gigawatts of solar panels
in 2024, more than double the previous year, making it the worldrCOs third-biggest importer, according to data from the climate think tank
Ember.
..
PakistanrCOs story is unique, said Mustafa Amjad, program director at Renewables First, an energy think tank based in Islamabad. Solar has
been adopted at mass scale in countries including Vietnam and South
Africa, rCLbut none have had the speed and scale that Pakistan has had,rCY
he told CNN.

ThererCOs one particular aspect fascinating experts: The solar boom is a grassroots revolution and almost none of it is in the form of big solar
farms. rCLThere is no policy push that is driving this; this is
essentially people-led and market driven,rCY Amjad said.

PakistanrCOs solar story is not a straightforward good news story; itrCOs complex and messy with potential trouble ahead as the energy landscape
changes radically and rapidly. But many analysts say whatrCOs happening
here undermines an increasingly popular narrative that clean energy is unaffordable, unwanted and can only succeed with large-scale government subsidies.

As the country grapples with severe and deadly heat waves rCo
temperatures nudged toward 122 degrees Fahrenheit in April rCo there is
also hope access to solar can help people afford the cooling systems on
which they increasingly rely to survive.
A rCybottom-uprCO revolution

PakistanrCOs solar boom is due to a rCLperfect stormrCY of factors, said Waqas Moosa, chair of the Pakistan Solar Association and the CEO of Hadron
Solar.

Chief among those are the tumbling cost of solar panels from China
coupled with sky-high electricity prices.

PakistanrCOs electricity woes can be traced back to the 1990s when it
entered into expensive power agreements, many tied to the US dollar,
where producers were paid regardless of whether they produced
electricity, said Asha Amirali, a research associate at the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Bath."
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