MURIDKE, Pakistan, Oct 2 (Reuters) – Karamat Ali’s cows and buffalos once provided his multi-generational family with milk. But earlier this year, the 61-year-old sold about a dozen bovine – and spent the proceeds on a set of solar panels.
The rice farmer in Pakistan’s Punjab province now uses his panels to power a tube well, which is composed of a water well and a motorised groundwater pump. The device allows Ali to irrigate his crops with greater ease and frees him from depending on the erratic electricity grid and pricey diesel to power the pump.

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“Water supply to my paddy feed is smoother than before,” he said.
As Pakistan undergoes a solar revolution, farmers like Ali are increasingly ditching diesel and grid power for sun-powered tube wells, according to interviews with 10 growers, as well as government officials and analysts.
The solar boom has coincided with the rapid depletion of water tables in Pakistan’s most populous province, according to previously unreported Punjab water authority documents viewed by Reuters. The documents did not pinpoint any cause.
Six of the farmers told Reuters that they had started irrigating their rice paddies far more regularly – including up to several times a day as part of a practice known as pulse irrigation – which would not have been possible without solar water pumps. Farmers are also choosing to grow more thirsty rice crops than in previous years, with the size of rice fields in Pakistan increasing 30% between 2023 and 2025, U.S. Department of Agriculture data show. Meanwhile, the amount of land dedicated to growing less water-intensive maize fell 10%.
There are no recent official estimates on the number of tube wells in Pakistan, which doesn’t require their registration. But so widespread is their use that farmers choosing to power the devices with solar are set to drive a 45% collapse in the amount of grid electricity consumed by the agriculture sector in the three years through 2025, said energy economist Ammar Habib, who serves as an advisor to Pakistan’s power minister. His estimate was based on consumption data published by the national energy authority.
Reuters’ calculations based on Habib’s data, which were reviewed by Habib and Lahore-based renewables analyst Syed Faizan Ali Shah, indicate that some 400,000 tube wells that once relied on grid electricity have switched to solar. Farmers using solar panels have likely purchased an additional 250,000 tube wells since 2023, Habib estimates, signalling that the sun now powers roughly 650,000 such devices across Pakistan.
Details about the scale of Pakistani agriculture’s transition to solar and its impact on groundwater are being reported for the first time.
The solar boom in Pakistan, which was encouraged by a sharp increase in power tariffs in 2023, is being replicated worldwide. Heavy production of solar panels in China has driven an 80% collapse in prices of the modules since 2017, prompting farmers from lushly forested Brazil to drought-prone Iraq to turn to the sun to power their irrigation systems.
The explosion in availability of cheap solar panels is posing a particular threat to water levels in the South Asian bread basket of Punjab.
The water table has shrunk below 60 feet – a level designated as critical by the provincial irrigation department – across 6.6% of Punjab as of 2024, according to maps published for internal use by water authorities and seen by Reuters. That marks an increase of some 25% between 2020 and 2024, while the deepest pockets – with water levels beyond 80 feet – more than doubled in size during the same period.
Pakistan power minister Awais Leghari told Reuters in June that it was a “misconception that solar tube wells are depleting groundwater.”
Farmers using devices were drawing similar amounts of water as before, he said. “The land under cultivation hasn’t increased. They’re just replacing expensive diesel with solar.”
The minister didn’t respond when presented in September with the accounts of farmers indicating that they had increased their irrigation of crops and data showing an expansion in rice fields.
Solarization is “good for the environment because it’s clean energy,” said Punjab irrigation minister Muhammad Kazim Pirzada. “But at the same time, it is also impacting our water table.”
His department told Reuters it was continuing to study the relationship between tube wells and groundwater depletion, but that it had undertaken measures to protect the water table. Recent flooding also affected some of the dryer areas in Punjab, possibly recharging some water tables, the minister added.
Pakistan, one of the world’s most water-stressed nations, has found itself embroiled in conflicts over the resource with its upstream neighbour India, with whom it briefly fought in May.
But for many farmers in Punjab, the threat to the water table is a problem for tomorrow.
Growers have been battered by a years-long fall in the global price of wheat, Punjab’s staple crop. Rural poverty in Pakistan spiked to a record high in May 2023 and remains elevated after an International Monetary Fund bailout that year that imposed higher energy tariffs and taxes.
The switch to solar has allowed 61-year-old Mohammad Naseem to save some 2 million rupees (about $7,000) – or more than quadruple Pakistan’s gross domestic product per capita – in power costs since he bought his panels four years ago.
The ability to irrigate at will has increased production modestly by between 400 and 600 kg of rice each year, he said, though the quality of the crop yield has improved, allowing Naseem to obtain better prices.
“I wash it with water. I sleep near it,” said Naseem, who prizes his panels so much that he dismantles them every evening and brings them home from the fields to prevent possible theft.
“Solar panels should be installed at all costs,” said 38-year-old subsistence farmer Rai Abdul Ghafoor, who has been saving for a purchase.
While poorer farmers like Ghafoor are still reliant on diesel and grid power, many agriculture-dependent villages have pooled sums to purchase the panels as communal property.
Haji Allah Rakha, an 80-year-old farmer who has 16 panels, shares them with two other families. “They contribute, and we all benefit,” he said.
“Farmers share, rent and move panels like tractors,” said Lahore-based solar-panel merchant Shahab Qureshi. “They sell land, jewellery, or take loans just to get it. Within five to six months, your return on investment is fulfilled.”

RAISE THE GROUNDWATER

Federal and provincial officials have started to pay more attention to the slow-boiling crisis, especially after India suspended its participation in an accord governing the sharing of water from the critical Indus river system earlier this year.
Punjab began aquifer-recharge pilots, which aim to slow depletion and ensure stable groundwater supply, at more than 40 sites before India’s April move, though officials said such projects have grown in importance since.
“This is our small effort to return the due share to the aquifer,” said Adnan Hassan, a researcher for Punjab’s irrigation department. “If polluted water is injected (due to over-extraction), the next generation will suffer.”
The province is also reviving old infrastructure such as the Ravi Siphon, a colonial-era tunnel that helps stabilize flows from the Ravi River. Officials hope that improving conventional irrigation methods will reduce the need for farmers to extract groundwater.
Independent environmental scientist Imran Saqib Khalid said Pakistan still lacks measures like the comprehensive mapping of wells and real-time monitoring of withdrawals that would contain the water crisis.
The solar push lacks “any method to the madness,” he said, adding that without a change in governance, groundwater depletion would continue unabated: “In the long run, this will have an impact on cropping intensities and the types of crops we can grow, which in turn will impact our food security.”
($1 = 283.0500 Pakistani rupees)

Additional reporting by Mubasher Bukhari in Lahore and Salah Uddin in Muridke; Editing by Katerina Ang

Source

Egypt’s petroleum sector successfully balanced the need to maintain uninterrupted electricity supplies with providing for the country’s broader energy needs during a “challenging” fiscal year (FY) 2024/25, the minister of petroleum and mineral resources said on Sunday.

Chairing a board meeting of the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation (EGPC) to approve the year’s results, Minister Karim Badawi praised the efforts of the sector’s employees. He highlighted a two-pronged strategy that addressed declining domestic production while expanding infrastructure to receive new supplies, noting that these efforts have successfully stabilised local output and put it on an upward trajectory.

Badawi also stressed the importance of an integrated plan to increase crude oil production in the near term and prioritising projects that provide petroleum products locally to reduce the import bill. He thanked President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi for his full support and continuous follow-up on the sector’s activities, particularly the payment of dues to foreign partners, which he said has created an attractive investment environment.

During the meeting, EGPC’s CEO, Salah Abdel Karim, reviewed the year’s key results. He announced the signing of 11 new agreements for oil and gas exploration and production, 12 development and production contracts, the achievement of 49 new oil and gas discoveries, and the implementation of a plan to drill 71 exploration wells.

Egypt's Petroleum Sector balanced power supply, energy needs in challenging year: Minister

In securing the needs of the local market, Abdel Karim said the full domestic consumption of 83.6 million tonnes of petroleum products and natural gas was met, while total local production exceeded 60 million tonnes. Refineries processed about 25.3 million tonnes of crude oil to provide various petroleum products and fuel.

In the area of energy transition and emissions reduction, he said 18 projects were implemented in solar energy, reducing diesel consumption, and utilising flare gas, with an estimated annual return of about $58m. These projects will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by approximately 270,000 tonnes annually.

At the conclusion of the meeting, the minister honoured the top five companies that successfully increased production over the past year: Badr Petroleum, Petrosnan, Alamein, Borg El Arab, and Khalda. He also recognised the top five companies in the field of safety, occupational health, and environmental protection: Petrobakr, Pharaonic, Rashid Petroleum, Petrobel, and Petrosafe.

Source

Carbon emissions from the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies have been directly linked to dozens of deadly heatwaves for the first time, according to a new analysis. The research has been hailed as a “leap forward” in the legal battle to hold big oil accountable for the damages being caused by the climate crisis.

The research found that the emissions from any one of the 14 biggest companies were by themselves enough to cause more than 50 heatwaves that would otherwise have been virtually impossible. The study shows, in effect, that those emissions caused the heatwaves.

The carbon pollution from ExxonMobil’s fossil fuels, for example, made 51 heatwaves at least 10,000 times more likely than in an unheated world, the researchers found, as did the emissions from Saudi Aramco.

Global heating is making heatwaves more frequent and more intense across the globe, contributing to at least 500,000 heat-related deaths a year. The searing heatwave that struck the Pacific north-west of the US in 2021 was made almost 3C hotter, for example.

The new research found that the total emissions from the 180 “carbon major” companies included in the analysis were responsible for about half the increase in intensity, with emissions due to forest destruction making up most of the rest. It also found that the 213 heatwaves studied became 200 times more likely on average from 2010 to 2019 owing to the climate crisis.

“Being able to trace back the contribution of these single [carbon major] emitters and quantify their contribution could be very useful for establishing potential liability,” said Prof Sonia Seneviratne, at ETH Zurich university in Switzerland, a senior author of the report.

Dr Davide Faranda, a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and not part of the study team, said: “This study adds a crucial new step: it connects the dots between specific climate disasters and the companies whose emissions made them possible. This bridge could become a cornerstone for legal and policy action to hold polluters accountable.”

Cassidy DiPaola, a spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, said: “We can now point to specific heatwaves and say, ‘Saudi Aramco did this. ExxonMobil did this.’ When their emissions alone are triggering heatwaves that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, we’re talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms.”

The world’s highest court, the international court of justice, ruled in July that failing to prevent climate harm could result in having to pay compensation, while a German high court set a legal precedent in May that fossil fuel companies could be held liable for their contribution. “Here’s the evidence the courts have been waiting for,” said DiPaola. “The bill is coming due, and it’s time these polluters pay for the damage they’ve done.”

The research, published in the journal Nature, used a type of analysis called attribution. This compares the hotter world today with the world before mass burning of fossil fuels to assess how emissions have driven up temperatures, using weather data and computer models.

The scientists first worked out how much each carbon major’s emissions had pushed up temperatures and then how much these higher temperatures increased the likelihood of heatwaves. Previous research has linked hundreds of individual events to global heating, but this study is the first to systematically analyse a series of events.

“Climate change has made each of the 213 heatwaves more likely and more intense, and the situation has worsened over time,” said Dr Yann Quilcaille of ETH Zurich, the lead author of the study.

The research found the increase in average intensity of the heatwaves rose from 1.4C in 2000-09 to 2.2C in 2020-23. The 213 major heatwaves assessed happened from 2000 to 2023 and spanned every continent. The data on them was taken from the biggest disaster database, EM-DAT, but Africa and South America were significantly underrepresented due to lack of reporting and suitable weather data.

“The study’s findings likely underestimate the true scale of these events, and the real consequences are probably far greater,” said Dr Friederike Otto, at Imperial College London.

Even the emissions from the fossil fuel companies at the bottom of the list of carbon majors had a significant impact on heatwaves. The carbon pollution from each of these caused 16 heatwaves to become at least 10,000 times more likely than before the climate crisis.

“This study is a leap forward that could be used to support future climate lawsuits,” said Dr Karsten Haustein, at the University of Leipzig in Germany, and not part of the study team. “It is also a reminder that denial and anti-science rhetoric will not make climate liability go away.”

Carbon emissions are emitted when people use oil, gas or coal to heat their homes or power their transport, but Quilcaille said fossil fuel companies had a particular responsibility – they had pursued profit through disinformation and lobbying, despite having known since the 1980s that burning fossil fuels would lead to global heating.

However, no polluter had yet been held accountable in court and challenges remained, said Prof Michael Gerrard and Dr Jessica Wentz, of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

“The problem is the various legal issues that must be resolved before scientists can take the witness stand,” they said in a commentary in Nature. The issues included which courts should hear the cases, whether fossil-fuel producers should be liable for their customers’ emissions, and if long campaigns of deception by some fossil fuel companies were relevant, Gerrard and Wentz said.

“The new study is one more building block, and a useful one, but the road to actual liability for the carbon majors is still littered with legal and evidentiary potholes,” they said.

ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco did not respond to requests for comment.

Source

A fast-moving global transition to solar and wind energy may not only curb emissions but also reshape political and economic power, says climate author Bill McKibben.

David Goodman reports for VTDigger.

In short:

Bill McKibben argues that falling costs for solar and wind have made clean energy the most affordable power source on Earth, marking a pivotal shift in global energy systems.
His new book, Here Comes the Sun, frames renewable energy not just as a climate solution, but as a potential force for democratic stability and equity.
McKibben is organizing a global day of action called Sun Day on Sept. 21, 2025, to promote a break from fossil fuels and celebrate clean power.
Key quote:

“There is one big good thing happening on planet Earth and it’s so big and so good that it actually has the capacity to help not only with the overwhelming climate crisis, but also with the crisis of inequality and of democracy that we’re facing now.”

— Bill McKibben, author and climate organizer

Why this matters:

Renewable energy is a disruptive force in geopolitics and economics. As solar and wind power become cheaper than coal and gas, nations can reduce reliance on fossil fuels that have long fueled conflict, inequality, and environmental destruction.

A decentralized energy model could erode the dominance of petrostates and corporations while expanding access to electricity and reducing pollution. That shift could also limit the political leverage of fossil fuel interests, which have blocked environmental reforms in many countries. In the U.S., where fossil fuel money continues to influence public policy, cleaner energy could loosen that grip.

Source

CAIRO, Aug 27 (Reuters) – Egypt signed a $220 million contract on Wednesday with investors from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and China to build an integrated complex for producing solar cells, panels and energy storage systems in the Suez Canal Economic Zone, the cabinet said.
It said the facility would have the capacity to produce 2 gigawatts of solar cells and 2 gigawatts of solar panels.

Source

Researchers also suggest system could resolve problems with irregular and weather-dependent Earth-based supply

Solar panels in space could cut Europe’s terrestrial renewable energy needs by 80% by 2050, a study has found.

Using a detailed computer model of the continent’s future power grid, the researchers found that a system of space-based panels designed by Nasa could reduce the cost of the whole European power system by as much as 15%. It could also cut battery use by more than two-thirds.

The study, led by researchers at King’s College London, is the first to assess the possible impact of space solar energy on Europe. The space-based solar power (SBSP) panels that yielded the positive results uses a heliostat design. The design, which the system imitates, uses mirror-like reflectors to collect sunlight in orbit. The sunlight is then transmitted to stations on Earth and converted to electricity before it is delivered to an energy grid.

The computer model of the continent’s power grid spans 33 countries, and simulates electricity demand, generation and storage to identify the lowest-cost option to meet Europe’s electricity needs.

When the researchers integrated the SBSP concept into the model based on Nasa’s predictions of its potential energy capacity, results showed that it could replace as much as 80% of Europe’s land-based renewable energy.

Land-based renewable energy is irregular and weather-dependent, complicating reliable supply, and comes at varying costs, the researchers point out. SBSPs could be an alternative centralised energy resource that operates above the atmosphere with continuous gigawatt-scale power.

The authors note that the modelling does not account for potential impacts from space-specific challenges such as orbital congestion, transmission interruptions or beaming variability, which could influence SBSP reliability and operational performance.

Nor could the potential cost-effectiveness of SBSP be realised until 2050 because building, launching and maintaining it would be too expensive unless technological growth reduces its costs.

Dr Wei He, a senior lecturer at KCL’s engineering department and lead author of the study, which is published in Joule, said: “There are some risks to consider, such as how the satellite in space could have too many solar panels. Could it cause collisions or be damaged by debris in space?”

Despite those risks, Wei believes the research shows that SBSP has the potential to help countries in achieving net zero. “Renewable energy to replace fossil fuels is the most important action we are taking as humans. Space-based solar power is a potential technology and can provide continuous solar power as a renewable energy source,” he said.

The planet’s most important stories. Get all the week’s environment news – the good, the bad and the essential

Europe could follow suit, the paper suggests, mentioning the continent’s longstanding tradition of multinational cooperation of cross-border electricity exchange and satellite ventures under the European Space Agency.

The authors believe Europe could leverage its multinational cooperation to develop and operate a centralised SBSP infrastructure. In doing so, it could create a continent-scale solution to provide stable, baseload-scale renewable supply, reducing the continent’s reliance on gas-fired power.

“Now is the time,” Wei said.

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