Pakistan’s wind power is going to waste

BY: AMENA H. SAIYID

GHARO, PAKISTAN — Standing beneath a 300-foot wind turbine, listening to rhythmic whooshes of blades slicing through gusty winds across Pakistan’s Sindh Province, it is easy to forget that Zephyr Power’s wind farm is just 34 miles from Pakistan’s bustling Port Qasim on the Arabian Sea.

Located along the Indus River Delta, Zephyr is one of more than three dozen independent wind farms in Pakistan’s Jhimpir-Gharo wind corridor — an arid tract of land 37 miles wide and 113 miles long where wind gusts average about 16 miles per hour.

The turbines in Jhimpir-Gharo now have an installed capacity of 1.8 gigawatts, nearly the size of the Hoover Dam in the United States. Wind provides about 3% of the country’s electricity, but in the opinion of developers and analysts, Pakistan is wasting the potential of this clean resource.

To support its fledgling wind industry, Pakistan must upgrade its aging transmission infrastructure, a challenge facing many countries, including the U.S. But in Pakistan’s case, wind has the government’s support; in the U.S., President Trump actively discourages wind development.

Even the government’s backing isn’t enough to shore up the wind industry, though. Pakistan’s precarious economic situation means the government here is going to have to get creative.

Read Amena Saiyid’s first three dispatches from her travels in Pakistan: How solar is transforming the country, where she saw solar being used and the prevalence of cheap Chinese solar panels.

Wind and Sindh

Pakistan came late to the wind-power game. Its first wind farm went up in 2009, three years after the enactment of a law requiring nationwide development of renewable energy.

Studies conducted at the time identified the wind corridor between the towns of Jhimpir and Gharo for wind development because the land was mostly desolate and unsuitable for cultivation.

Reaching Zephyr’s 50-megawatt wind farm takes nearly two hours driving through Karachi’s gritty industrial corridors, over the Sindh Coastal Highway, past tiny ramshackle fishing villages and across the Gharo Creek, where local fishermen sell their fresh catch.

On the farm, more than two dozen wind turbines are perched on mounds of engineered concrete piles amid muddy flats interspersed with mangroves, crawling with mud crabs, eerily reminiscent of Planet Tatooine in the first Star Wars film. Some of the turbines spin swiftly, while others stand idly by, awaiting their turn.

Over the past three years, Zephyr and Pakistan’s other wind farms have had to curtail nearly half of their turbines’ potential electricity generation. But the problem is not the turbine technology; it is the result of slowed national economic activity, complicated by Pakistan’s overwhelming power-sector debt, aging infrastructure and the challenges of integrating intermittent renewables into a fragile power grid.

This scenario was not foreseen by developers, investors or the government, said Zephyr’s chief executive officer Kumayl Khaleeli.

Lingering slowdown

Pakistan’s industrial activity, which drives demand for power, has struggled since the pandemic ended. High electricity rates along with reduced government spending have contributed to the sector’s decline, according to the World Bank’s latest update.

At the same time, Pakistan is struggling to contain its ballooning power-sector debt, which reached $8.63 billion in March. State-run electricity distribution companies are losing revenue for a variety of reasons, including underutilization of power plants and power losses due to aging and inefficient transmission networks or theft.

As a result, the government-run Central Power Purchasing Agency can’t always compensate private power-plant producers as required by their purchase agreements — including renewables firms like Zephyr — leaving them short on cash.

Ironically, there’s no lack of electricity in Pakistan, which has the capacity to produce it in excess from fossil fuel plants. However, the government is locked into buying electricity from these expensive producers, leading it to curtail activity at cheaper wind farms that carry no such obligations, according to Islamabad-based think tank Renewables First. In addition, the difficulty of managing the variable nature of renewable energy means the grid often relies on always-available fossil fuels, said Khaleeli.

Another issue hurting wind farms in Sindh is that the highest energy demand is further north in Punjab, but transmission bottlenecks and overloaded lines hinder the efficient transfer of power from one region to the other.

The curtailments in wind generation are taking a toll on both Zephyr’s bottom line and its turbines. Curtailing requires adjusting the blades so they don’t run as efficiently, wearing them down over time.

On top of all this, wind projects in Pakistan are contractually bound to receive energy payments for sending electricity to the national grid. But they only receive partial payments, set by a complex formula, if the electricity is not transmitted because of bottlenecks in transmission lines.

This is not the case for fossil fuel plants, which are fully reimbursed — even when they aren’t fully utilized — thanks to generous government contracts, explained Asim Javed, an Islamabad-based independent financial and regulatory consultant for the power sector.

In the fiscal year that ended in July 2024 (figures aren’t yet available for FY 2025), Pakistan’s National Electric Power Regulatory Authority said wind farms dispatched three-fourths of their projected power generation of 5.2 terawatt-hours.

Inside Zephyr’s site office in Gharo, which also serves as a guesthouse for out-of-town visitors, Khaleeli expressed his frustration with the ongoing situation.

Although the government eventually compensated Zephyr for more than half of its generation losses from curtailment, Khaleeli is disappointed that he cannot operate his turbines at full capacity during peak wind season, spanning March through September, when most wind plants make 70% of their revenue.

What’s next

Any day now, the Ministry of Power is expected to announce renegotiated power contracts with several wind companies. The International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s financing arm, warned against such a move earlier this spring, saying it would undermine investor confidence.

Khaleeli too is concerned about the outcome, given the root problems have not been resolved.

“Don’t expect substantial investments” in the renewable energy sector until the government improves the transmission network and resolves issues around curtailment and energy purchase agreements, he said.

One obvious solution would be to address the poor transmission system between the south and north, explained Rabia Babar, energy and climate data manager for Renewables First, the Islamabad-based think tank. Indeed, the government is currently trying to resolve right of way issues involved in building a high voltage transmission line between the regions.

Pakistan Power Minister Awais Leghari admits that wind generated in the Sindh corridor is underutilized, but he said adding transmission lines alone will not solve the problem. “The cost of the transmission is going to add up. That is ultimately going to land on the consumer,” Leghari said.

He offered another potential solution: adding battery storage systems that could better utilize wind power’s full potential. He noted that the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank are helping Pakistan finance utility-scale battery storage systems in at least two locations, including Jhimpir.

But Leghari said he has an even bigger idea, which is to privatize the power sector like it is in the U.S. and parts of Europe — meaning the government is “not going to be the buyer of power anymore.”