Bangladesh wants 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy by 2030. Today, we have roughly 1,500 MW. That gap – 8,500 MW in four years – means adding more clean power capacity every single year than the country has built over the previous decade combined. At the current pace, this target will not be missed by a little. It will be missed by a lot.
The problem isn’t ambition. It’s plumbing.
Bangladesh’s power sector runs on a single-buyer model: the Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB) buys electricity from generators and sells it to distribution companies. This worked well enough when the task was adding a handful of large gas and coal plants. It is the wrong machine for adding dozens of solar, wind, and water-based projects every year, at speed.
Consider what a developer faces today. A rooftop solar project can use net metering – fine for a garment factory roof, but useless for utility-scale ambitions. A large project can go through Public-Private Partnership channels, but that route typically takes 18 to 36 months from concept to financial close, passing through the PPP Authority, IMED, BPDB, and BERC in sequence. At that pace, Bangladesh might complete two or three major projects a year. We need the equivalent of one every few weeks.
There is precedent for moving faster. The now-abolished Quick Enhancement of Electricity and Energy Supply Act – commonly called the Quick Supply Act – allowed the government to bypass standard tendering to rapidly add emergency IPP capacity during the power crisis years.
It worked, in the narrow sense that capacity was built quickly. It also drew justified criticism for opaque deal-making and capacity payments with little accountability. The right lesson from that experience isn’t “never move fast again.” It’s “build the fast lane properly this time, with guardrails.”
A fast lane with guardrails
What Bangladesh needs is not a tweak to existing rules but a dedicated Renewable Energy Procurement Act – a single law creating one clear gateway for renewable projects, with strict statutory timelines and explicit limits on which agency does what.
A Renewable Energy Fast-Track Authority could be required to decide on any application within 90 days, sorting projects into three lanes by size: competitive auctions for large projects above roughly 10 MW, where the lowest credible bid wins on a fully transparent basis; standardised, pre-published tariffs for the 1-10 MW range, where auctions are needlessly expensive to run; and simple, fast registration for small rooftop and distributed systems. Three lanes, three fixed clocks — the speed of the Quick Supply Act, with the transparency it lacked.
Just as important, a developer today can spend a year bouncing between the Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission (BERC), the Sustainable and Renewable Energy Development Authority (SREDA), the Bangladesh Power Development Board (BPDB), the Power Grid Company of Bangladesh (PGCB), and the Department of Environment, each holding a piece of jurisdiction over the same project. A new Act should draw that map once, clearly, and bind every agency to it.
Two markets that don’t yet legally exist
The single-buyer model also blocks two financing tools that could channel significant investment into renewables quickly. Peer-to-peer trading would allow a rooftop solar owner to sell surplus power directly to a neighbouring factory through the existing grid, at a price somewhere between the regulated floor and the retail ceiling – with no need to route every kilowatt-hour through BPDB.
Merchant power plants would allow larger solar and wind farms to sell directly to export-oriented industries and large commercial buyers, which increasingly need verifiable green power to meet international buyers’ sourcing requirements. Neither requires a fully liberalised electricity market. Both can be legalised as narrow, well-defined carve-outs that exist alongside BPDB’s core role, not in place of it.
But neither market is free to operate. Both still rely on the existing grid, and whoever owns that infrastructure – the distribution utilities and PGCB – will rightly expect a wheeling charge for carrying someone else’s electricity across their network. That charge is not just an administrative fee. Stacked on top of the generation cost, it raises the effective levelised cost of electricity for the buyer.
If set too high, it can quietly erase the price advantage that made direct sales attractive in the first place. Get the wheeling tariff wrong, and a merchant solar deal ends up costing an industrial buyer more than simply staying on the regulated grid tariff, defeating the entire purpose of opening these markets.
Land is the real constraint, not money
Even with financing and regulations sorted, Bangladesh has a problem that money cannot fix: around 1,100 people per square kilometre and very little spare land. Reaching 10,000 MW cannot rely on ground-mounted solar farms alone. It requires a genuine technology mix.
Wind has barely been tapped, despite credible coastal and offshore potential that could plausibly deliver a meaningful share of the 2030 target on its own. Floating solar on aquaculture ponds, irrigation reservoirs, and abandoned river channels could add substantial capacity without taking an inch of farmland.
Agrivoltaics – panels raised above rice paddies and vegetable plots, or low-cost bamboo greenhouse structures growing shade-tolerant crops underneath – can allow the same acre to produce both power and food, provided agricultural yields are properly monitored so that energy ambitions never quietly erode food security.
Each of these technologies requires its own light-touch regulatory framework: water-body classification rules for floating solar, co-location standards for agrivoltaics, and a serious resource assessment to finally put wind on the map. None of this is exotic. It is the difference between treating 10,000 MW as a rooftop-and-tender arithmetic problem and treating it as a genuine national energy transition.
None of this requires reinventing Bangladesh’s power sector. BPDB can retain its central role. What must change is everything built around it: a faster gateway for project approvals, two carefully designed new markets for direct electricity sales, and a technology mix – solar, wind, floating solar, and agrivoltaics together – that turns land scarcity into an advantage rather than an excuse.
The target is still within reach. The clock, however, is the one thing this plan cannot fast-track.
(Muhammad Hasnat Morshed Bhuyan is a Deputy Secretary and Energy Analyst. He writes articles for Just Energy News and can reach at [email protected])