China building world’s largest solar park in Pakistan

Chinese firms are building the largest solar power farm in the world in Pakistan and the site will have 5.2 million photvoltaic cells and produce enough energy to power 320,000 households.

Xinjiang SunOasis has finished building a 100 MW solar project in the Punjab desert of Pakistan which is part of ambitious plans for Chinese companies to build the words largest by 2017.

The new project was completed in just three months at a cost of about US$131 million and includes 400,000 solar panels spread over 200 hectares of desert.

The installation is named Quaid-e-Azam Solar Power Park (QASP) after Pakistan’s founding father.

The project is the first part of the US$46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor linking the port at Gwadar in southern Pakistan with Kashgar in China’s western region of Xinjiang.

The QASP plant is the pilot stage of plans to construct the world’s largest solar farm.

The farm is due to be completed in 2017 and will have a capacity of about 5.2 million PV cells producing an estimated 1,000 MW of electricity – roughly the equivalent to power 320,000 homes.

Construction of the next stage has already been started by Zonergy, another Chinese company.

Chief executive officer of QASP Najam Ahmed Shah, said the solar park will also reduce Pakistan’s carbon footprint, mitigating about 57,500 tonnes of coal and cutting carbon emissions by 90,750 tonnes every year.

Pakistan is aiming to reduce its reliance on hydrocarbons, especially imported coal, oil and gas, to around 60 per cent by 2025 from the present 87 per cent.

The government has set a target to increase the share of renewables in the nation’s energy mix from 2 per cent to 10 per cent, excluding hydropower, which already accounts for 15 per cent of the total energy mix.

According to climatologist Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, the UN secretary general’s special advisor for Asia with the World Meteorological Organisation, Pakistan’s carbon emissions are growing by 3.9 per cent every year and by 2020 it will emit about 650 million tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) at the current rate.