A cramped market in the heart of Dhaka has become an unlikely ground zero for Bangladesh’s energy transition. Down narrow aisles crowded with shoppers and delivery workers, tiny storefronts are overflowing with rows of solar panels and batteries. Monju Hossain, a sales representative for Dongjin Group Bangladesh, said the retailer is struggling to keep up with demand, with sales jumping 50% in recent months from a year earlier.
The country’s worsening energy crisis, triggered by the war in the Middle East, is pushing households and businesses to seek alternatives to an increasingly unreliable grid. From the Philippines to Pakistan and Nigeria, people are turning to solar and batteries to cut utility bills or just to keep the lights and machinery on. It’s a threat to the long-term demand outlook for liquefied natural gas, given that populous developing nations like Bangladesh have long been touted as high-growth markets for the super-chilled fuel.
The South Asian nation of 180 million has been one of the hardest-hit by the disruption to energy flows from the Persian Gulf. Load-shedding — or rolling blackouts — have stretched to as long as 18 hours a day in some parts of the country this year as LNG exports from Qatar, formerly Bangladesh’s main supplier, slowed to a trickle. To help make up the shortfall, Bangladesh has been buying LNG on the spot market, at around triple the price of its contracted supply from Qatar, forcing utilities to hike electricity bills.
That combination of higher costs and power cuts is pushing consumers toward renewables. Even Prime Minister Tarique Rahman has installed solar panels on his house, according to local media reports this week. An informal survey of more than three dozen stalls at the Kaptan Bazar — one of Bangladesh’s biggest hubs for solar equipment — found that all of the shops have seen demand increase to varying degrees.
A plunge in the cost of solar panels and batteries in recent years has made the technology more affordable for regular households, spurring sales not just in Dhaka’s markets, but across the country. China, the world’s dominant manufacturer of solar and battery equipment, is helping enable the shift. Bangladesh’s imports of the equipment from the country more than doubled to about $140 million in the March through September period from a year earlier.
Panels made by China’s Jinko Solar and Longi Green Energy Technology are by far the most popular due to their low price and reliability, according to the Dhaka store owners. Buying a 750-watt panel, enough for a single household, costs about 15,000 taka ($121), compared to about 38,000 taka a year in electricity bills. Adding a battery and associated equipment will quickly boost the outlay by several times, but those costs can be recouped within a decade for a normal family, Dongjin Group’s Hossain said.
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