{"id":14909,"date":"2025-07-27T00:04:21","date_gmt":"2025-07-27T00:04:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=14909"},"modified":"2025-07-27T00:04:21","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T00:04:21","slug":"energy-starved-pakistans-solar-rush","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=14909","title":{"rendered":"Energy-starved Pakistan’s solar rush"},"content":{"rendered":"
Pakistanis are increasingly ditching the national grid in favour of solar power, prompting a boom in rooftop panels and spooking a government weighed down by billions of dollars of power sector debt.<\/p>\n

The quiet energy revolution has spread from wealthy neighbourhoods to middle- and lower-income households as customers look to escape soaring electricity bills and prolonged power cuts.<\/p>\n

Down a cramped alley in Karachi, residents fighting the sweltering summer heat gather in Fareeda Saleem’s modest home for something they never experienced before \u2014\u00a0uninterrupted power.<\/p>\n

“Solar makes life easier, but it’s a hard choice for people like us,” she says of the installation cost.<\/p>\n

Saleem was cut from the grid last year for refusing to pay her bills in protest over enduring 18-hour power cuts.<\/p>\n

A widow and mother of two disabled children, she sold her jewellery \u2014\u00a0a prized possession for women in Pakistan \u2014\u00a0and borrowed money from relatives to buy two solar panels, a solar inverter and battery to store energy, for Rs180,000.<\/p>\n

As temperatures pass 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), children duck under Saleem’s door and gather around the breeze of her fan.<\/p>\n

Mounted on poles above homes, solar panels have become a common sight across the country of 240 million people, with the installation cost typically recovered within two to five years.<\/p>\n

Making up less than two percent of the energy mix in 2020, solar power reached 10.3 percent in 2024, according to the global energy think tank Ember.<\/p>\n

But in a remarkable acceleration, it more than doubled to 2 4 percent in the first five months of 2025, becoming the largest source of energy production for the first time.<\/p>\n

It has edged past gas, coal and nuclear electricity sources, as well as hydropower which has seen hundreds of millions of dollars of investment over the past decades.<\/p>\n

As a result, Pakistan has unexpectedly surged towards its target of renewable energy, making up 60 percent of its energy mix by 2030.<\/p>\n

Dave Jones, chief analyst at Ember, told AFP that Pakistan was “a leader in rooftop solar”.<\/p>\n

Soaring fuel costs globally, coupled with demands from the International Monetary Fund to slash government subsidies, led successive administrations to repeatedly hike electricity costs.<\/p>\n

Prices have fluctuated since 2022 but peaked at a 155-percent increase and power bills sometimes outweigh the cost of rent.<\/p>\n

“The great solar rush is not the result of any government’s policy push,” Muhammad Basit Ghauri, an energy transition expert at Renewables First, told AFP.<\/p>\n

“Residents have taken the decision out of clear frustration over our classical power system, which is essentially based on a lot of inefficiencies.”<\/p>\n

Pakistan sources most of its solar equipment from neighbouring China, where prices have dropped sharply, largely driven by overproduction and tech advancements.<\/p>\n

But the fall in national grid consumers has crept up on an unprepared government burdened by $8 billion of power sector debt, analysts say.<\/p>\n

Pakistan depends heavily on costly gas imports, which it sells at a loss to national energy providers.<\/p>\n

It is also tied into lengthy contracts with independent power producers, including some owned by China, for which it pays a fixed amount regardless of actual demand.<\/p>\n

A government report in March said the solar power increase has created a “disproportionate financial burden onto grid consumers, contributing to higher electricity tariffs and undermining the sustainability of the energy sector”.<\/p>\n

Electricity sales dropped 2.8 percent year-on-year in June, marking a second consecutive year of decline.<\/p>\n

Last month, the government imposed a new 10-percent tax on all imported solar, while the energy ministry has proposed slashing the rate at which it buys excess solar energy from consumers.<\/p>\n

“The household solar boom was a response to a crisis, not the cause of it,” said analyst Jones, warning of “substantial problems for the grid” including a surge during evenings when solar users who cannot store energy return to traditional power.<\/p>\n

The national grid is losing paying customers like businessman Arsalan Arif.<\/p>\n

A third of his income was spent on electricity bills at his Karachi home until he bought a 10-kilowatt solar panel for around 1.4 million rupees (around $4,900).<\/p>\n

“Before, I didn’t follow a timetable. I was always disrupted by the power outages,” he told AFP.<\/p>\n

Now he has “freedom and certainty” to continue his catering business.<\/p>\n

In the eastern city of Sialkot, safety wear manufacturer Hammad Noor switched to solar power in 2023, calling it his “best business decision”, breaking even in 18 months and now saving 1 million rupees every month.<\/p>\n

The cost of converting Noor’s second factory has now risen by nearly 1.5 million rupees under the new government tax.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pakistanis are increasingly ditching the national grid in favour of solar power, prompting a boom in rooftop panels and spooking a government weighed down by billions of dollars of power sector debt. The quiet energy revolution has spread from wealthy neighbourhoods to middle- and lower-income households as customers look to escape soaring electricity bills and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}