ISLAMABAD, Oct 27 (Focus Pakistan) – The Pakistan grid battery project at Jhimpir now carries an estimated price tag of Rs4.395 billion, nearly five times the Rs940 million planners approved in 2018.
Monday’s go-ahead came from the Central Development Working Party (CDWP), which Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal heads. The battery is due to go up at the 220-kV Jhimpir-I grid station in Sindh, the ministry said.
Why the bill rose 367%, the ministry did not say. Nor did it give a finish date or confirm that the 2018 design still holds. The figures compare approved estimates, not actual spending.
The pilot, Pakistan’s first grid-connected battery, has slipped behind schedule. An investment plan from the National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC), the state grid operator that now trades as National Grid Company of Pakistan, set a July 2022 start and a February 2024 finish.
That plan put physical progress at 3.49% on the battery and 11.72% on substation work. The figures predate this week’s approval, and no public update has given a current progress figure.
Asian Development Bank (ADB) money paid for the first version. An ADB slide deck on the pilot breaks it down: a $4 million grant from the bank’s High-Level Technology Fund, $3 million of it for building the plant, and about $3 million drawn from a transmission loan tranche that the bank cleared in June 2018.
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The battery in that plan was small, 20 megawatts, 5 megawatt-hours, lithium-titanate chemistry. At full output, it would drain in about 15 minutes. The ADB intended it to provide sub-second frequency regulation near Jhimpir’s wind farms, not to supply households.
ADB simulations pointed to modest gains. After the loss of a 660-megawatt generating unit, the battery cut the grid’s frequency dip by 0.019 hertz at its lowest point and improved voltage across the area that Hyderabad Electric Supply Company (HESCO) serves.
At the planning stage, the same presentation described load shedding as Pakistan’s main tool for controlling grid frequency.
Grid operators worldwide increasingly use batteries to steady frequency as wind and solar output rises and falls with the weather. Jhimpir, about 120 km (75 miles) northeast of Karachi, hosts a cluster of Pakistan’s wind farms.
The federal government allocated 500 million rupees to the Jhimpir project in its 2026-27 development programme. Power Minister Awais Leghari has since reviewed its progress at a meeting of the government’s steering committee on battery storage, according to a post on his LinkedIn account.
The ADB wanted the pilot to inform revisions to Pakistan’s Grid Code and help create a commercial market for ancillary grid services, according to the bank’s project documents.
Pakistan now has far larger storage plans. An ADB project record describes a separate grid battery scheme for the country as one of the largest grid-scale storage deployments the bank has supported, and the first transmission-level system of its size in Central and West Asia.
The Planning Ministry’s announcement did not say how much of the original allocation NTDC has spent or when the Jhimpir battery will begin operating.
