PHOTO: COLLECTED

Bangladesh’s economy remains highly susceptible to price volatility in the international energy market. This vulnerability became fairly evident when the Russia-Ukraine war broke out in 2022 and more recently, when the Iran-US conflict began in March this year. The war in the Middle East has resulted in an abnormal hike in the price of liquefied natural gas (LNG), forcing the country to seek costlier spot cargoes. This event exposed how quickly a distant war can travel through the Strait of Hormuz into domestic power shortages, industrial anxiety, and fiscal pressure. Imported LNG accounts for more than 25 percent of Bangladesh’s national total gas consumption, and about 42 percent of total gas consumption goes to the power sector. And this is precisely why solar must be treated as an energy security strategy, not merely a climate aspiration.

The recent national energy policy of Bangladesh is the Renewable Energy Policy (REP) 2025 that sets a target to generate 20 percent of the country’s electricity from renewable sources by 2030 and 30 percent by 2041. The policy recognises the country’s dependence on natural gas and other fossil fuels and connects renewable expansion with local manufacturing capability, cost competitiveness, and human resource development. There is no lack of ambition when it comes to increasing renewable energy capacity. Current SREDA dashboards on renewables show that Bangladesh has about 1.74 gigawatt (GW) of installed renewable capacity, accounting for about 5.24 percent of total installed energy generation capacity, of which 1.45 GW is represented by solar, consisting of solar parks, rooftop net metering, and solar home systems (SHS). Apart from solar installations, there are initiatives in solar panel exports and foreign investment in solar. In June 2025, Radiant Alliance, a Bangladesh-based company, exported solar panels to the US market for the first time. In March 2025, Chinese solar manufacturer Longi revealed plans to invest in solar panel manufacturing in Bangladesh.

The government has also pushed some big rollouts on solar expansion. In December 2025, the erstwhile interim government approved 12 new private solar plants with a combined capacity of 918 MW. As part of the National Rooftop Solar Program 2025, the government aims to install 3,000 MW equivalent of solar panels on state-owned buildings, alongside net metering reforms that now allow systems up to 100 percent of sanctioned load, compared to about 70 percent in the past. The sanctioned load is the maximum amount of power that an electricity provider authorises a consumer to use at any given time. However, so far most of such scaling only exists on paper and we are left with an uncomfortable question: who will build, install, test, service, and maintain all this capacity? This is where the bottleneck begins.

Bangladesh may be announcing a solar manufacturing and deployment push, but its training pipeline is not ready for it yet. A 2024 future-skills study on Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in Bangladesh found a serious shortage of skilled workers and a persistent mismatch between what graduates learn and what employers need. Around 60 percent of the study’s respondents said that their technical skills needed further improvement after graduation. The same study also claimed that the National Technical and Vocational Qualifications Framework (NTVQF) is not implemented fully and the student enrolment exceeds infrastructural capacity. Furthermore, the students do not benefit from learning to operate old and obsolete machines when companies recruit for newer technologies. The graduates also ultimately struggle in the labour market due to a lack of coordination between training institutions and employers. This becomes problematic when it comes to readying a workforce to maintain the country’s solar infrastructure as the sector is heavily reliant on practical know-how than just theoretical knowledge.

The REP 2025 opens doors to production-based incentives, tax exemptions, and duty or VAT cuts on certain solar components. These measures can help local industries grow, but they do not run on policy alone. They run on technicians, supervisors, quality inspectors, electricians, operators, trainers, and after-sales service teams. Solar localisation without skills localisation is unlikely to achieve much. Meanwhile, implementation problems are already visible in reality. There are debates over rooftop solar costs, import duties on accessories, and whether the policy mix is helping adoption fast enough. Apparel sector entrepreneurs argue that import taxes increase system costs just when rooftop solar could decrease both energy vulnerability and carbon emissions. At the same time, the government wants to protect and nurture local manufacturing. However, even if tariffs are perfectly balanced, Bangladesh will still struggle unless it produces enough competent workers for a growing solar ecosystem.

The good news is that the REP 2025 already has a practical opening. It directs SREDA to support training and research, encourage renewable energy curriculum from the school level to university, and maintain a national database for designers, installers, maintenance professionals, suppliers, importers, manufacturers, and EPC companies. The database could become the backbone of certification, accountability, and labour market visibility. The conflicts around the world may calm down soon enough and shipping routes may regain normalcy too, resulting in spot LNG prices to stabilise. However, Bangladesh’s skills gap will persist unless the country treats it as seriously as it treats capacity targets. A panel on a rooftop cannot secure a factory, a school, or a grid if no one is there to install it properly, certify it credibly, or repair it when it breaks down. Bangladesh needs more solar, but it needs a workforce for it even more. Energy security will not come from solar panels alone but from the skilled hands that make them work.