Solar power is the fastest growing energy source. Our climate change projections need to catch up.

As the satellite zoomed in, the panel could be seen glowing from space. BloombergNEF solar analyst Jenny Chase and her team matched images taken miles above Earth with China’s customs records, showing that solar panels are covering the roofs of homes and factories across Pakistan. This year I discovered that. To the surprise of their own government, Pakistanis have been installing massive amounts of solar power.

In the process, Pakistan has grown from an insignificant solar power market to the sixth largest in the world. The country of 242 million people has an electricity grid of up to 46 gigawatts. This accounts for less than 4% of the electricity supply in the United States, a country with more than two-thirds of the population. Pakistan has imported over 25 gigawatts of solar panels from China in the past three years. This unregulated bottom-up boom increased Pakistan’s electricity supply by 50 percent.

The solar power surge is being driven by rising electricity prices in the region. Business electricity prices in Pakistan are 16.6 cents per kilowatt hour, 37 percent higher than neighboring India and more than double the average price in Asia. Under an agreement signed in the 1990s, Pakistan remains locked into expensive contracts with independent power producers, whose power plants burn large amounts of liquefied natural gas, but the threat of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 remains high. Since then, the cost has become even more expensive. In the same year, Pakistan experienced a currency crisis. The country’s dollar reserves were depleted and everything became more expensive.

All this opens up the opportunity for companies and wealthy Pakistanis to start importing solar panels from China, paying for themselves in as little as two years and freeing users from expensive and unreliable power grids. The middle class is starting to do the same. The state is under pressure to raise prices on its conventional grid to meet contracts with power producers, making it harder for an increasingly shrinking and impoverished customer base to pay. Consumers who have switched to solar panels, including the owner of a factory manufacturing soccer balls in Sialkot, told the Financial Times: “Allah has given us this gift to get us out of this mess.” .

But there’s a bigger story here than just the problems of one country’s power grid. What’s happening in Pakistan is the latest sign that energy officials are underestimating how much clean power the world needs, and that energy models could suffer from the same biases as their makers. It is a sign of These failures in numerical processing are not just abstract. The world is building towards a cleaner future because we don’t know how much energy is needed and what people in places like Pakistan are going to do to get it. , funding, and planning remain unready.

Why our energy demand forecasts are always wrong

History shows that cheap energy creates its own demand. As steam engines became more efficient in 19th century Britain, coal consumption increased. When oil became cheap and plentiful after World War II, humanity did not enjoy the savings. They built more cars. More recently, in 2000, when estimating industrializing China’s electricity demand for 2005, the Energy Information Administration missed its forecast by 25 percent.

Modelers try to predict how much energy will be needed in a few years. However, these projects often fail to distinguish between the amount of energy needed and the amount of energy needed.

This is partly because the International Energy Agency (IEA), the intergovernmental body that oversees the world’s energy sector, has significantly underestimated its growth every year since 2006, as well as national renewable energy targets. It is about the special performance of solar power generation. The IEA’s Net Zero by 2050 report is an ambitious plan for how to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by the middle of the 21st century when it is released in 2021. was considered. The report calls for the world to add 630 gigawatts of solar power annually by 2021. 2030. This actually turns out to be a very easy goal. The world is already on track to add nearly 600 gigawatts in 2024. — 334 gigawatts in China, 53 gigawatts in the United States, and surprisingly, at least 16 gigawatts in Pakistan.

The pattern is that Western energy forecasters continue to be surprised by how much energy people in developing countries consume. As countries like Pakistan become wealthier, their citizens will demand the same energy-dependent conveniences that people in wealthy countries already demand. And our energy forecasts must reflect that reality or we will continue to be wrong.

One recent prediction illustrates this problem. The Danish Energy Agency collaborated with Pakistan’s energy authorities to consider how Pakistan’s electricity sector could develop in 2023 in line with the IEA’s net-zero to 2050 pathway. The report predicts that Pakistan’s electricity generation will reach about 350,000 gigawatt hours (a unit of long-term energy use) in 2045, doubling from its 2022 generation capacity of 173,000 gigawatt hours. But that would still mean hundreds of millions of people living in a future Pakistan would have to live on far less electricity than the state of Texas produces today, a fraction of Pakistan’s population.

But this estimate does not take into account Pakistan’s middle class, which numbers about 100 million people and millions more trying to escape poverty and join its ranks. As people become wealthier, they demand more electricity and use more electricity. Currently, only 11 percent of Pakistani households have air conditioning. At least 568 people died in six days in June when temperatures reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the South. In our planned 3 degrees Celsius scenario by 2100, South Asia’s major cities would experience multiple heatwaves each year, lasting an average of 23 days, almost twice as long as they currently do. It becomes the length. Even if air conditioning became more efficient, a scenario in which electricity generation only doubled between now and 2045 would not protect large swaths of the population from deadly temperatures in the 2040s.

Pakistan’s rising middle class will either continue to endure heatwaves like this year’s without using technology to alleviate its suffering, or it will consume far more electricity than prominent energy consumption forecasts assume. Either you end up doing it. That would set a precedent. Global energy demand to power air conditioning and other cooling measures has increased from 300 terawatt-hours in the 1990s to 800 terawatt-hours by 2023. This is one reason why global carbon emissions have yet to peak. In Pakistan, a recent study found that rising temperatures will increase electricity demand twice as fast as current estimates (6-8 percent per year). The IEA itself also revised its electricity demand growth forecast upward by 6% again, adding that air conditioning demand was a key uncertainty.

Energy and climate system models contain many assumptions that are often not communicated to the people reading the headline results. Some scholars call this “status quo bias.” When energy agencies in Paris and Copenhagen claim that the world could reach net zero if millions of Pakistanis had enough electricity to run their ceiling fans, they could install them in Pakistan. It would assume certain limits on the amount of electricity and the amount of electricity Europeans could install. Reduce emissions to give Pakistan room to grow. When seemingly apolitical integrated assessment models that assess the economic consequences of climate change tell policymakers what temperature targets are possible or desirable, they also reveal political assumptions that are often faulty. .

William Nordhaus, who coined the integrated assessment model and won the Nobel Prize in 2018, argued that “the optimal value for cost-effectiveness (against global warming) is an increase of 3 degrees Celsius by 2100.” In other words, the most cost-effective outcome of climate change, in terms of how much it costs and how much damage it does to stop climate change, is to raise the average global temperature by 3 degrees Celsius. This is double the global warming target set in 2015. The Paris Climate Agreement (a goal the world is missing). But at whose cost and for whom is it optimal? Models like Nordhaus assume that economic development can protect people from climate change caused by the same economic activity. This idea assumes that there are limits to how much the world’s rich countries can slow down (or green) their energy consumption to stop climate change. Therefore, we assume that there is a limit to the amount of new energy that can be allocated to poor countries. their rapidly developing economy;

The world’s growing middle class is no longer waiting for permission to buy an air conditioner. The challenge now is to ensure that the energy that powers it is clean. This means installing enough solar panels in Lahore and Copenhagen.