Curtailing clean power

Summary

• Turning off wind turbines not only wastes clean power in the short term, but also degrades valuable national energy assets over time.
• Opening the central grid to competitive bilateral trading will allow large industrial factories to purchase cheap wind power directly from southern generators through transparent wheeling tariffs.
• Moving forward with NEPRA’s proposed 800 MW wheeling allocation, combined with a mandatory 10 percent battery storage requirement for renewable projects, will give factories access to affordable power while helping the grid absorb variable generation.

AI Generated Summary

By Faheemullah Shaikh 

Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering,
Mehran UET, Jamshoro, Sindh, Pakistan.

In the wind corridor of southern Sindh, dozens of white wind turbines stand motionlessly against the sky. They are not broken, nor is the wind missing. Instead, grid managers in Islamabad have ordered them to stop turning.

Pakistan has 1,838 MW of wind power capacity across 36 commercial projects in the Gharo-Jhimpir region. Yet, despite an estimated onshore wind potential of 349 GW, these farms generated just 3,843.36 GWh of electricity in FY 2024-25. This amounted to under three percent of the country’s utility grid output, leaving the wind fleet running at a dismal average capacity factor of 23.87 percent.

This systematic turning off of clean energy exposes a growing conflict between private investors and state grid managers. When developers signed power purchase agreements, they were guaranteed legal priority dispatch under national renewable energy policies. For the 12 modern wind projects completed since 2021, developers agreed to supply power at a low baseline tariff of Rs 13.8 to Rs 14 per unit, with extra generation priced under Rs 1 per unit.

Today, these low-cost plants are regularly ordered to shut down, forcing investors into financial distress while their equipment suffers mechanical damage from repeated stopping and starting.

State grid managers argue that these shut-downs are necessary to prevent physical network failures. Power generated in Sindh cannot flow freely to central and northern cities, where three-quarters of national electricity demand is located.

Overloaded 500 kV transmission lines out of Jamshoro and Matiari cap South-to-North power transfer at 1,800 MW, far below the system’s intended 4,500 MW capability. Consequently, operators routinely turn off up to 1,750 MW of southern power to avoid line overloads. According to NEPRA’s State of Industry Report 2025, these transmission bottlenecks left 491.89 GWh of clean renewable energy completely unutilized in a single year.