It’s October and it will still take a few weeks for the winter to set in in the coastal district of Thatta. It is a hot day and due to soaring humidity levels, Chandni, 45, sweats as she carries wood on her head on her way home in the village of Haji Ghulam Jhakro situated near the Keenjhar Lake, which is not only a popular picnic spot in Thatta district for the people of the neighbouring Karachi city but also a vital source of water for the provincial capital and commercial hub of the country.
Chandni routinely carries wood to her home to use it as fuel for cooking as there is no gas in the village. She will burn the logs to cook meal for her family of eight.
The government has been kind enough to provide electricity to the village but this benevolence gets nullified by prolonged power cuts. With the rising cost of living especially in the recent years, it has been difficult for Chandni’s family to make ends meet. Her father-in-law suffers from a lung infection, and the family cannot help when the fumes from burning wood worsen his cough.
Chandni is drenched in sweat from head to toe while carrying the piles of wood home and again while cooking for the family in scorching heat. The family cannot afford gas cylinders.
All the family longs for is an uninterrupted supply of basic utilities. “Just the sight of a moving fan is soothing to our eyes,” she says.
Chandni’s family is not the only one facing these issues as at least six villages surrounding the lake are without gas. Little do they know that the provincial government is planning a 500-megawatt (MW) floating solar PV project on the Keenjhar Lake at an estimated cost of USD 380-400 million to supply power to the K-Electric (KE) grid for distribution among power consumers of Karachi.
Despite living near the lake, they are most likely not to get any benefit if this project gets implemented. Rather environmentalists fear the floating project will exacerbate the living conditions of the villagers by negatively impacting the lake’s beauty, ecosystem and fish population.
The lake is a source of livelihood for these communities as they use its water for irrigation, catch fish from it and find employment in huts and restaurants as well as tourist boat businesses.
Although the floating solar project is currently far from implementation, the authorities have been boasting of it stating that it is also set to be showcased at the UNDP’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Investment Fair in New York in 2025.
While the project is being hailed as a good step towards renewable energy transition, experts and locals believe the element of ‘justice’ seems to be missing from it, as there would be no equitable distribution of benefits and all the losses would be borne by the local community.
Dr Khalid Waleed from the Sustainable Development Policy Institute believes that benefitting the local communities must be a key part of the spirit of any renewable energy project. The right to consume energy first rests with the locals, he says.
Speaking to The Citizenry, Sindh Energy Department’s Director of Alternative Energy Mehfooz A Qazi said that under the corporate social responsibility (CSR), the project’s proponent is required to allocate 5 per cent of the power production for the local communities, which amounts to 25MW. However, this seems to be nowhere mentioned in the project’s Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) report.
The planning on the floating solar project started after private firm GO Energy (Pvt) Limited’s Chief Operating Officer Ammar Ali submitted a proposal on February 15, 2022, to the Sindh government for developing a 500MW floating solar power plant on the Keenjhar Lake.
The only publicly available document for the project is its ESIA, which does not include any elaborate plan to compensate for the losses that the local communities will incur as a result of the implementation of the project.
Any transition to alternative energy models must be welcomed but precautionary steps are equally a must to ensure that they do not cause injustice or result in the loss of livelihoods. In this regard, a project implemented in South Africa could be a guiding example.
South Africa’s coal mining and power sector employs around 200,000 people, yet the country has recently started a bold plan to phase it out over climate concerns but at the same time it is trying to ensure that the transition does not cause economic turmoil and political unrest.
The country launched its Just Energy Transition Investment Plan (JET IP) for five years (2023-2027) at the COP27. Starting this year, South Africa is taking 3,600 MW of coal power off the grid. These power stations will be converted to use renewable energy sources like solar or wind with added energy storage systems.
This transition serves as a cautionary tale with many lessons for the world. The resulting joblessness created significant resentment in South Africa among communities. Thousands of local workers lost their jobs when ESKOM, one of the largest coal-powered plants in South Africa was converted onto renewable energy sources.
However, ESKOM stood out in the energy transition globally due to its extensive stakeholder engagement and efforts to help former coal workers transition to new jobs in the clean energy sector.
The authorities carefully worked on South Africa’s ambitious framework for a just transition, which they finalized before the implementation of JET IP. This framework is built on three guiding principles aimed at fostering an environmentally sustainable economy and society: distributive justice, restorative justice and procedural justice.
• Distributive justice focuses on ensuring that the burdens and benefits of the energy transition are shared equitably, taking into account gender equality and the rights of indigenous peoples.
• Restorative justice ensures that the transition respects the conditions outlined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and supports sustainable development.
• Procedural justice emphasises inclusion through social consensus, stakeholder engagement, transparency and opportunities for broader participation in decision-making.
These principles seem to be absent in the 500-MW floating solar project on the Keenjhar Lake. The project’s ESIA report paints a bleak picture of the villages surrounding the lake, many of which lack basic utilities like power, gas and clean water supply. The villages also lack schools and hospitals, and “the literacy rate is very low in the overall project area.”
Villagers fear that covering the lake with solar panels will disrupt local businesses and fishing activities.
The document includes interviews of some villagers that reflect what they expect. “The residents demanded that the salary of the school teacher be paid from the CSR funds of the proposed project or from the profits of GO Energy,” reads the ESIA report in its stakeholder consultation chapter.
According to the report, Achar Jakro, a village founder, asserted that 500 MW was sufficient to light up every house in Thatta district. “Therefore, neighbouring villages should be provided with free electricity or a fixed bill of Rs100 per month,” he suggested.
The local community is not the only one expressing concerns over the project. The deputy conservator of the Sindh wildlife department raised alarms about its potential negative impacts on the fisheries department. He noted that blocking sunlight could lead to increased growth of moss and fungi in the lake, adversely affecting fish and bird migration patterns and making birds less likely to nest near the lake.
He pointed out that while solar panels are installed near the Haleji Lake, they are on the ground, not floating on water. He recommended conducting thorough studies on the flora and fauna near the proposed project site, including invasive species, and an animal control study to protect both tame animals and wildlife from potential dangers of the project.
Dr Laila Shahnaz, associate professor at the University of Karachi’s (KU) botany department, said that while the project would not affect water inflow and outflow, it could cause temperature variations detrimental to fish growth and alter algae growth, damaging the fish food web.
KU zoology department’s Dr Mohammad Shoaib noted that installing solar panels over a lake could disrupt the food chain for species that rely on sunlight for sustenance. He proposed making solar panel materials transparent to allow sunlight to penetrate into water. He also suggested that such projects should be implemented in desert areas.
He warned that temperature variations in the lake could affect bird migration patterns. He also highlighted that the Keenjhar Lake serves as a man-made source of drinking water for Karachi and stressed the need for ensuring a continuous water supply from the lake and protecting it for future use.
Karachi Water & Sewerage Corporation Chief Engineer Sikandar Zardari also emphasised the importance of ultraviolet radiation reaching the water for cleaning it, eliminating bad odours, absorbing carbon and killing bacteria. He noted that the project would hinder penetration of ultraviolet rays in the lake, which is also crucial for food preparation of plants and other species.
He also pointed out that the Keenjhar Lake was a Ramsar site, protected under an international environmental treaty signed in Ramsar, Iran, in 1971 under Unesco.
He explained that Siberian birds migrate to wetlands for food, and disturbing the lake’s environment could trap them. He compared the project to a similar one in India, noting that in the Indian project, those floating solar panels were placed on a flowing canal, whereas the water in the Keenjhar Lake is stagnant.
Qazi, however, dismissed these objections, stating that such projects have been successful internationally. He asserted that the solar panels will have sufficient gaps between them, allowing the sunlight to pass easily into the water.
Commenting on suggestions for placing the solar panels on land, he said the panels’ performance would be better on water, as it would help keep them cool. He mentioned that the solar panels would only cover 5 percent of the Keenjhar Lake, leaving the remaining 95 percent uncovered. He also stated that the solar panels would be floating, so there wouldn’t be any issue of sun rays penetrating the water.
If the voices of environmental experts have any weightage, the project seems to violate the UN’s Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which advocates for the protection of biodiversity-rich areas like the Keenjhar Lake and aims to restore at least 30 per cent of such damaged land, freshwater and coastal areas by 2030. The framework also stresses the rights of local and indigenous communities.
Subedited by Bilal Ahmed
Header image generated by AI