A surprise solar boom reveals a fatal flaw in our climate change projections
By Noah Gordon and Daevan Mangalmurti, Vox.
Excerpt: ...Catching their own government by surprise, Pakistanis have been installing a massive amount of solar power. ...Pakistan has gone from an inconsequential solar market to the sixth-largest in the world. ...In the last three years, Pakistanis have imported more than 25 gigawatts of solar panels from China. This disorganized, bottom-up boom has increased Pakistan’s power supply by 50 percent. ...power plants burn lots of liquefied natural gas, which became costlier after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. That same year, Pakistan fell into a foreign exchange crisis ...which made everything more expensive. All of this opened an opportunity for businesses and better-off Pakistanis to begin importing solar panels from China, which can pay for themselves in as little as two years and free their users from the expensive, unreliable grid. The middle class has started to do the same. ...the particular outperformance of solar, whose growth the International Energy Agency (IEA), an intergovernmental organization that oversees the global energy sector, has drastically underestimated every year since 2006 — as have countries’ own renewable energy targets. The IEA’s Net Zero by 2050 report, a plan for how to eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions by the mid-21st century, was seen as ambitious when it came out in 2021. It called for the world to add 630 gigawatts of solar power annually by 2030. This is actually proving a very easy target: The world is already on track to add nearly 600 gigawatts in 2024 — 334 gigawatts in China, 53 gigawatts in the US, and, stunningly, at least 16 gigawatts in Pakistan....