Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif told a high-level dialogue on the clean energy transition at COP31 in Antalya on Wednesday that Pakistan would need about $138 billion by 2035 to build low-carbon power, and another $50 billion to replace coal with solar.
The 35×35 electrification goal “will be achieved only if finance flows at the speed of ambition through concessional capital and transfer of affordable technology,” he said.
He said Pakistan had already changed course on its own. Households and businesses had added nearly 22 gigawatts of rooftop solar in just two years, a “quiet revolution” driven by ordinary people looking for cheaper and more reliable power.
The prime minister said he had inaugurated a section of the country’s seventh nuclear power plant while travelling to Antalya a day earlier. The plant will add 1,200 megawatts to the grid. Clean sources now make up nearly 55 per cent of Pakistan’s energy mix, he said.
On transport, he said a new auto policy aims for electric vehicles to make up 30 per cent of new vehicle sales by 2030, helped by lower tariffs. All future government buses and motorcycles are to be electric, and for the first time more than one in every 10 motorcycles sold in Pakistan this year was electric.
But he warned that the shift could not last without money to expand grids, build energy storage, and bring down the cost of new technology. Countries already weighed down by debt needed help so that climate action did not deepen their economic troubles, he said.
“Let us resolve to power our economies without impoverishing our people and light up our rooms without darkening our planet,” he said.
Earlier on Wednesday, the prime minister met Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, and World Bank President Ajay Banga on the sidelines of the summit.
