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From Energy Poverty to off-grid Smart Energy: Measured Household Air Quality and Willingness to Pay in Skardu, Gilgit-Baltistan
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In a remote Pakistani town where families burn wood, dung, and kerosene to survive freezing winters, indoor air pollution reached levels 10 to 30 times over safe limits, far worse than the smoggy air outside. The good news: solar power plus battery storage could deliver cleaner heat for roughly the same cost families already spend on dirty fuel each winter, offering a path to healthier homes and cleaner air.
Gilgit-Baltistan lies at the periphery of Pakistan's electricity network, and in Skardu the consequences are acute. The town sits at 2,228 m, receives no piped natural gas, and endures a heating season of four to five months in which night temperatures fall between −10 and −20 °C. More than 80% of households therefore burn wood, dung cakes, crop residue, kerosene, coal, or plastic waste for warmth and cooking. This paper asks two questions: what the present fuel regime costs the people who live with it, and whether those people would pay for an alternative. We deployed low-cost optical particulate sensors indoors and outdoors through the 2023 heating season, applied a radiative forcing model of black carbon deposition to nearby glaciers, recorded household fuel expenditure, and sized an off-grid photovoltaic and storage system for the site. Measured indoor PM2.5 varied sharply by configuration: 359 to 463 µg/m3 with a wood Angeeti stove, 306 to 382 with cow dung, 261 to 375 with a kerosene heater, and 48 to 149 with a liquefied petroleum gas appliance by day, rising to 399 to 409 in that same room during the evening pollution peak. Indoor carbon dioxide reached 4,711 ppm, confirming that rooms are sealed against the cold to the point of eliminating ventilation. Outdoor daily air quality index values at the main bazaar peaked at 467. Modelled black carbon deposition adds an estimated 1 to 3 mm of water-equivalent melt per day on nearby ice. Sized on January irradiance, a 1.5 kWp array with 4 kWh of storage delivers electricity at about PKR 55 per kWh for a capital outlay near two winters of the fuel spend the highest-spending surveyed household already reports.
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