The energy transition Bangladesh’s textile industry can’t afford to ignore

Bangladesh’s textile manufacturers are learning that energy is no longer just a cost line, it is a question of survival. In the 6^th episode of ReCIRCLE by TexSPACE Today, three industry professionals sat down to discuss what a secure, cost-effective, low-carbon energy strategy looks like on the factory floor. The episode featured Md. Saiful Islam, Head of Environmental Sustainability at Palmal Group of Industries; Naznin Akter, Director of Business Development at Solaric; and Shadman Jahin Bishal, Senior Energy Specialist at Engineering Resources International (ERI) Ltd. The panel is moderated by Najmus Sakib, Sub-editor, TexSPACE Today. Their conversation moved from gas crisis and grid instability to financing gaps, waste heat recovery, and what an energy-smart factory could look like by 2035.

Energy security, not efficiency alone, is the next decade’s real test

Saiful Islam, who has spent more than a decade on sustainability and energy transition in textiles, said the industry’s questions have changed. A decade ago, factory managers asked how much energy they were consuming. Today they ask whether there is enough gas pressure, what electricity prices will do next, and what happens to production if the grid turns unstable. A war anywhere in the world, he said, can push up fuel and electricity costs for a factory thousands of kilometers away.

“The biggest energy challenge of the next decade is not simply energy efficiency,” he said, “it is energy security at a competitive cost while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions.”

Palmal has already picked the easy wins: efficient motors, boilers, and rooftop solar now at roughly 7 MW peak, expected to reach 10 MW once new buildings come online. The group is also developing a 16 MW solar park in Valuka, feeding its factories through a captive power plant arrangement and paying the government’s wheeling charge. But solar alone won’t carry the load, he cautioned, since Bangladesh’s mills still run on steam and heat as much as electricity.

Rooftop solar’s real barrier isn’t the technology, it’s the paperwork

Naznin Akter, who has worked in solar for 16 years and on industrial rooftop projects for the past seven, traced how the market shifted from an OPEX model, where developers install and sell power at a reduced rate, toward CAPEX ownership, which factories now prefer since a solar asset can run 30 years. That shift runs straight into financing hurdles, she said. Concessional loans at 5 to 6 percent exist on paper, but banks demand documentation many factories cannot produce, and guarantees of 50 to 70 percent of project value are common, turning financing into what she called a nightmare for manufacturers.

Policy has helped more than it has hurt, she noted. Bangladesh’s net metering framework enabled an estimated 600 to 700 MW of rooftop capacity that would not otherwise exist. But she pushed back on the claim that solar tariffs have dropped to zero: once 2 percent AIT and 15 percent VAT are applied to a photovoltaic generator system, the effective levy has actually climbed from around 1 percent to 17 percent.

Waste heat, not new machinery, is the cheapest carbon cut on the floor

Before any factory installs combined heat and power, distributed generation, or a microgrid, Shadman Jahin Bishal argued, it needs a proper energy monitoring system to understand its real load, not its installed capacity, a basic step most textile facilities still skip. He walked through an audit at a Comilla EPZ factory running a 3.5 MW captive generator producing about 2.1 tons per hour of exhaust steam, now driving a 505-ton vapor absorption chiller in place of the conventional electric chillers it replaced, a swap that cut roughly 1,700 kW of electrical load and an estimated 520 tons of CO₂.

“We are taking energy that was previously being wasted,” he said, “and converting it into a new usable form of energy.”

He listed similar wins elsewhere: jacket-water heat recovered for hot-water absorption chilling in Habiganj spinning mills, flash steam once drained straight from a washing floor, and a 921 kW screw compressor where roughly 90 percent of electrical input is normally lost as heat and can instead warm process water. Recovering condensate follows a reliable rule of thumb, he added: every 6°C gained in boiler feed water temperature saves about 1 percent in fuel. He also flagged an anti-dumping restriction on battery imports currently blocking factories from adding storage to their on-site generation mix.

Policy and finance, not technology, will decide how fast the shift happens

Asked for the one change that would most speed up adoption, Md. Saiful Islam agreed with Naznin Akter on policy coming first. Energy transition projects don’t fit the standard CAPEX-payback-ROI template banks use, he said; some technologies pay back fast, others, like the geothermal option Palmal is now studying, need a feasibility study before anyone knows if the economics work. He called for financing that values long-term impact over short-term returns, citing concessional loans, blended finance, and power purchase agreements, alongside collaboration through bodies like BGMEA so manufacturers can pool renewable projects instead of solving energy alone.

Naznin Akter extended the point to the investor side of the table. Solar projects need both equity and debt, she said, and foreign investors weighing rooftop, merchant power, or IPP tenders often hold back because Bangladesh Bank and BIDA rules make repatriating returns difficult. Local banks, she argued, need a clear framework before deploying green finance at scale.

“It’s not project-wise, it has to be country-wise,” she said.

The 2035 factory: How far efficiency can go before renewables take over

Asked to picture an energy-smart factory a decade out, Shadman Jahin Bishal said full net zero remains difficult in Bangladesh without a stable grid to lean on. His 2035 factory pairs that stable connection with full waste heat recovery, IE5-rated motors and variable frequency drives on every major load, and vapor absorption chillers replacing small split units wherever steam allows, with International RECs bridging whatever emissions remain.

Md. Saiful Islam agreed on the efficiency roadmap but drew a firm line on the certificates. Buying I-RECs every year, he said, is not a durable answer and should be a last resort, not a strategy. Palmal has already installed biomass boilers across its factories to offset part of its emissions and is now exploring geothermal as a further alternate source for what efficiency and biomass can’t reach.

“You have to always think about alternate energy or alternate source,” he said.

Across the full discussions, one thing held throughout: none of the panelists blamed a lack of technology for Bangladesh’s slow energy transition. Efficient motors, waste heat recovery, rooftop and utility-scale solar, biomass, and even geothermal are already proven and available. What’s missing, they agreed, is the ecosystem around them: financing that treats a 30-year solar asset like one instead of a five-year loan, tariff and metering rules that keep pace with what they enable, a stable grid to plan around, and monitoring systems that show a factory what it actually uses before it spends on fixing it. Whether the final stretch to net zero is closed by renewables or by carbon certificates remains an open question within the industry itself.

ReCIRCLE by TexSPACE Today is an initiative to promote dialogue, collaboration, and innovation toward a circular textile ecosystem, featuring thought leaders and industry practitioners sharing insights on textile circularity in each episode.