JULY 2, 2025

Thank you to everyone for your well wishes last week when we shared our news that we'll be ceasing publication on July 16. You’re the best!

We've received questions about what will come of the journalism we’ve done over the last nearly four years. Our website will be available as-is until year's end, and then still accessible via archived links after that. We’ll share more in the coming weeks.

In this week’s edition of Cipher: 

• Amena Saiyid writes about Pakistan’s troubled wind sector.
• She also shares reflections on returning to her home country to report on renewable energy.
• Cat Clifford charts how the United States overtook China on battery manufacturing investments last year.
• Our top reads get you up to speed fast on all the congressional action related to cleantech.

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Send your energy photos, story tips and more to news@ciphernews.com.

Illustration by Nadya Nickels.

Pakistan’s wind power is going to waste

Contract setup prioritizes fossil fuels over the renewable energy

BY: AMENA H. SAIYID

GHARO, PAKISTAN — Standing beneath a 300-foot wind turbine, listening to rhythmic whooshes of blades slicing through gusty winds across Pakistan’s Sindh Province, it is easy to forget that Zephyr Power’s wind farm is just 34 miles from Pakistan’s bustling Port Qasim on the Arabian Sea.

Located along the Indus River Delta, Zephyr is one of more than three dozen independent wind farms in Pakistan’s Jhimpir-Gharo wind corridor — an arid tract of land 37 miles wide and 113 miles long where wind gusts average about 16 miles per hour.

The turbines in Jhimpir-Gharo now have an installed capacity of 1.8 gigawatts, nearly the size of the Hoover Dam in the United States. Wind provides about 3% of the country’s electricity, but in the opinion of developers and analysts, Pakistan is wasting the potential of this clean resource.

To support its fledgling wind industry, Pakistan must upgrade its aging transmission infrastructure, a challenge facing many countries, including the U.S. But in Pakistan’s case, wind has the government’s support; in the U.S., President Trump actively discourages wind development.

Even the government’s backing isn’t enough to shore up the wind industry, though. Pakistan’s precarious economic situation means the government here is going to have to get creative.

Wind and Sindh

Reaching Zephyr’s 50-megawatt wind farm takes nearly two hours driving through Karachi’s gritty industrial corridors, over the Sindh Coastal Highway, past tiny ramshackle fishing villages and across the Gharo Creek, where local fishermen sell their fresh catch.

On the farm, more than two dozen wind turbines are perched on mounds of engineered concrete piles amid muddy flats interspersed with mangroves, crawling with mud crabs, eerily reminiscent of Planet Tatooine in the first Star Wars film. Some of the turbines spin swiftly, while others stand idly by, awaiting their turn.

Over the past three years, Zephyr and Pakistan’s other wind farms have had to curtail nearly half of their turbines’ potential electricity generation.

Lingering slowdown

Pakistan’s industrial activity, which drives demand for power, has struggled since the pandemic ended. High electricity rates along with reduced government spending have contributed to the sector’s decline, according to the World Bank’s latest update.

At the same time, Pakistan is struggling to contain its ballooning power-sector debt, which reached $8.63 billion in March. State-run electricity distribution companies are losing revenue for a variety of reasons, including underutilization of power plants and power losses due to aging and inefficient transmission networks or theft.

As a result, the government-run Central Power Purchasing Agency can’t always compensate private power-plant producers as required by their purchase agreements — including renewables firms like Zephyr — leaving them short on cash.

Wind projects in Pakistan are contractually bound to receive energy payments for sending electricity to the national grid. But they only receive partial payments, set by a complex formula, if the electricity is not transmitted because of bottlenecks in transmission lines.

What’s next

The Ministry of Power is expected to announce renegotiated power contracts with several wind companies. The International Finance Corporation, the World Bank’s financing arm, warned against such a move earlier this spring, saying it would undermine investor confidence.

Other possible solutions include improving transmission lines and installing battery storage systems.

But Pakistan Power Minister Awais Leghari said he has an even bigger idea, which is to privatize the power sector like it is in the U.S. and parts of Europe — meaning the government is “not going to be the buyer of power anymore.”

Read this article in full and share it on Cipher’s website.

Lunchtime Reads and Hot Takes

Senate passes Trump’s megabill after pulling all-nighter — POLITICO Pro (subscription)
Cat’s take: Three Republican Senators voted against the bill. The bill heads back to the House where voting could start as early as Wednesday in the race to make a self-imposed July 4 deadline.

Democrats Bet Jobs in Red States Would Save Clean Power Projects. They Lost. — The New York Times
Cat’s take: Many of the Inflation Reduction Act tax credits that have spurred significant investment in clean manufacturing and job creation in red states did not get the support of Republican Senators.

The Megabill’s Most Bizarre Fossil Fuel Handout — Heatmap News (subscription)
Amena’s take: Metallurgical coal isn't used to generate electricity abroad or at home. These tax credits are meant to shore up the nation's fledgling clean energy sectors, not prop up a mature industry.

The Mystery of the Senate’s Clean Energy Carveout — Heatmap News (subscription)
Amena’s take: A delightful read in which Jael Holtzman takes the reader through her efforts to tease out if any projects really qualify for the continued benefit or whether it's just a red herring.

EU plans to add carbon credits to new climate goal, document shows — Reuters
Anca’s take: Critics say this is adding loopholes to the EU's climate efforts and point to recent scandals that have shown some credit-generating projects did not deliver the climate benefits they claimed.

Google strikes fusion power deal — Axios
Cat’s take: This deal is a vote of confidence for the fusion industry writ large, which has long been in the innovation and development stage but hasn't yet been able to commercialize the technology.

India’s EV king stumbles as rivals ignite a new kind of price war — Rest of World
Bill’s take: India is a laggard in EV sales, although sales of two- and three-wheeled versions are growing fast. India could become the fastest growing market for the EVs in the world.

More of what we're reading:

• European renewable energy companies' shares rise after revised US senate bill — Reuters

• Republican budget bill dismantles climate law passed by Democrats — Associated Press

• Britain shuns $34 billion Morocco-UK subsea power project — Reuters
• Rick Perry’s AI plan: A colossal nuclear campus in Trump’s image — The Washington Post
  
  

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Home court advantage: Whirling turbines, solarized schools and of course, food poisoning

Illustration by Nadya Nickels.

BY: AMENA H. SAIYID

Returning to Pakistan for a reporting trip should have been a breeze since I had the home court advantage.

While I have lived in the United States for decades, I was born in Pakistan and spent the first 20 years of my life there.

I figured I wouldn’t have to jump through as many bureaucratic hoops as other foreign journalists. I had a network of friends and family members to help me arrange interviews and visits.

Still, the experience both challenged me as a journalist and gave me an opportunity to see my home country with fresh eyes.

For example, the wind farm tour I arranged in January and planned my entire trip around fell through shortly before my arrival. But my niece, who at the time was a legal counsel for a multinational power firm and had arranged the initial tour, was able to connect me with Kumayl Khaleeli, CEO of Zephyr Power, who agreed to drive me two hours outside of Karachi to see his company’s 50-megawatt wind farm in Gharo district.

I found myself glad my first tour had fallen through. I almost forgot I was in Pakistan when I stepped out of Khaleeli’s four-wheeler and into the coastal calm on the sandy banks of the Indus River Delta, wind turbines whirling rhythmically around me.

Lining up other interviews was also a bit hairy, requiring lots of patience and creative outreach.

There’s a truism in journalism: persistence pays off. Those conversations helped inform my understanding of the current energy landscape in Pakistan.

I had heard solar power was proliferating across the country, but that still didn’t prepare me to see the sun-seeking technology everywhere I looked. Many people I spoke to, sick of paying high electricity bills and dealing with multiple power blackouts a day, saw solar as their best option.

While climate change is still not a common topic of conversation, more Pakistanis seemed aware of climate change in my conversations on this trip than they had in the past.

In northern Pakistan, I saw how projects are helping protect communities like Khaplu from destructive glacial melt scouring mountainsides. I saw entrepreneurs taking risks on new solar companies, educators bringing renewable power to rural schools and developers like Khaleeli taking steps to make clean energy accessible to the public.

But the government has yet to address many critical environmental issues, including water pollution.

Water-borne diseases are so commonplace in Pakistan that it’s considered a badge of honor among expatriates to get sick at least once during a trip home. That’s no surprise, considering Lahore has just six wastewater treatment plants for a population of over 14 million people; compare that to the greater Washington D.C. region, where 37 operating plants serve just 6 million people.

In the end, my luck finally ran out. Toward the end of my stay, I contracted a truly awful case of food poisoning from lemonade at a newly opened café in the Walled City of Lahore. I was bedridden for three days, but at least I won my badge!

Read this article and share it on Cipher’s website.

U.S. leaps over China in battery investment — for now

Source: Global Clean Investment Monitor: Electric Vehicles and Batteries, Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research.

BY: CAT CLIFFORD

The United States overtook clean energy giant China to become the world’s leading investor in battery manufacturing last year, but that recent momentum may be in jeopardy.

The role reversal in battery-investment dominance is the result of two converging trends: tax credits from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act stimulating more investments in the U.S. and China pulling back its expenditures in the sector, according to a recent analysis by Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research.

The U.S. has laid the groundwork for a “renaissance in battery manufacturing,” said Hannah Pitt, director of Rhodium’s energy and climate practice. “We're really contending for a place in battery manufacturing globally.”

China has invested less and less in battery manufacturing since 2022. The government’s aggressive support of the sector had led to a glut of batteries and dropping global prices, while, at the same time, some of its subsidies for electric vehicles were phased out.

The U.S. may not hang onto the top spot in global battery investment, however. The tax credits that stimulated such growth in the domestic battery manufacturing sector face an uncertain future, as lawmakers on Capitol Hill debate rolling back many of the IRA’s provisions.

The changes being debated in Congress would be a “double whammy” for the battery market, Pitt said, because they could potentially hit both the supply-side of the market, by cutting tax credits for manufacturing, and the demand-side, by axing regulations that support electric vehicle and clean energy adoption.

Amidst the uncertainty, some investors are already hitting the brakes. In the first quarter of 2025, overall investments in U.S. battery manufacturing dipped slightly, as seen in the chart above. U.S. companies canceled more than $6 billion in battery projects in the period, the most since Rhodium started tracking the data in 2018.

The drive to eliminate the policies that support battery manufacturing comes primarily from President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress.

Republican districts have the most to lose, however, as battery manufacturing investments have disproportionately gone to red states and districts, Pitt said.

“There’s a whole industry that seems on the line here that’s a pretty critical industry for the technology of this century.”

AND FINALLY...
Lake solar

Cipher reader Shoko Carpenter snapped this photo on Lake Titicaca, the world's highest lake, located on the border between Peru and Bolivia. This home is located on one of more than 100 floating islands on the lake where the indigenous Uros people live. The Uros people have been installing solar panels on the islands for decades, according to Climate Home News.

Each week, we feature a photo that is somehow related to energy, the thing we all need but don’t notice until it’s expensive or gone. Email your ideas and photos to news@ciphernews.com.

Editor’s note: In addition to supporting Cipher, Breakthrough Energy also supports and partners with a range of entities working to tackle climate change, including nonprofits, corporations, startups and research firms. For more information on Cipher’s editorial policy, click here.