Challenges facing solar industry highlighted

LAHORE: Engr Syed Faizan Ali Shah, Member of the Prime Minister’s Pakistan Solarization Committee, highlighted key challenges facing the solar industry at the “sustainable energy solutions – achieving net-zero targets” seminar organized by Shenzhen Hopewind Electric.

Shah emphasized issues arising from distributed solar integration, including increased exports from net-metered systems, decreasing minimum operational grid load, regional grid disparities, technical concerns, reverse power flow, over-voltages, and power quality issues.

Despite these challenges, Pakistan’s solar industry has grown significantly, with 780MW utility-scale solar generation, 2700MW distributed solar production (excluding K-Electric’s 600MW), 2000-3000MW captive solar power generation capacity and 13GW worth of solar panels and inverters imported this year.

Shah attributed this growth to favourable policies, decreasing solar PV module prices, and increasing electricity costs.