Pakistan has announced plans to expand its wind and solar capacity, with a stated goal of achieving 20% of the country’s generation from renewable sources by 2025.
Head of the country’s Energy Task Force, Nadeem Babar, told Al-Jazeera that Pakistan will build a new range of solar and wind facilities, to reduce the nation’s reliance on gas and fuel imports.
With plans to add 7GW of renewables, mostly in the form of distributed energy resources, the country’s renewable capacity is set to quadruple by the target date.
Babar noted that plans to increase the country’s total generation capacity by 40%, to a total 43GW, would likely be approved before the end of August 2019.
The majority of the country’s transmission lines are already at capacity, and thus the location of new renewable generation will be carefully selected to lessen the strain on the grid.
Sign up to our newsletterMr Babar said: “The general policy is to have much higher emphasis on renewables over the next 10 years.
“Last year, 41% of generation was on imported fuels. That is just way too high.”
