When electricity bills nearly tripled, millions of Pakistanis ditched the grid for rooftops—setting off a solar rush that has left the country's power establishment scrambling.
By Science Blog Editorial Team · Edited by Mal James
Published September 8, 2026 · How we edit
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Solar power under Pakistan’s net-metering rules jumped from 190 megawatts in 2020 to roughly 6,978 megawatts by June 2026. An almost 37-fold rise in six years.
On a chart it looks like the dream curve every energy ministry wants to claim but it is worth being clear, early, about what actually caused it.
We are not energy economists or policy advisers, and nothing here is investment or planning advice. This is a piece of reading and reflection on one country’s experience, drawn from official presentations and published analysis. The patterns described are national, not a forecast about any individual household, grid, or market.
A line like that begs for a tidy explanation, and that explanation is usually policy. Somebody designed a clever incentive, the theory goes, and rooftops followed. It is a comfortable read, because it puts a government in charge and turns a messy outcome into a repeatable playbook.
Pakistan introduced national net-metering rules through NEPRA in 2015. Under the original system, electricity a household exported was netted against the electricity it drew from the grid, effectively valuing those units at the consumer’s normal per-unit electricity rate. Any excess could be carried forward or paid out at the applicable off-peak rate. That mattered. But treating it as the engine of the boom gets the cause backwards, and the people closest to the data are the ones saying so.
At a webinar run by the SAARC Energy Centre, Pakistan’s Energy Adviser to the Power Division, Syed Faizan Ali, ran through the causes. His framing was direct: the growth came mostly from the wider economy, not a subsidy. Between 2021 and 2025, the rupee lost about 75 percent of its value while electricity tariffs rose nearly 140 percent. Over the same years, the price of imported solar panels fell by roughly 60 percent.
Those three lines together contain the whole mechanism. Grid power got much more expensive. The hardware to make your own power got much cheaper. No feed-in tariff, no national rooftop scheme, no marketing campaign was needed to close that gap. The numbers closed it.
Jan Rosenow, who leads the energy program at the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, makes the same point more sharply. He writes that no dedicated subsidy did the work: “No subsidy programme drove it. There was no national rooftop scheme. No feed-in tariff. People just did it.”
Two things get lost when you lead with “190 to nearly 7,000.”
The first is that these are net-metered distributed-solar figures, not a measure of all the solar installed in Pakistan. Large amounts of behind-the-meter and off-grid capacity never appear in the net-metering totals.That makes the escape story stronger, not weaker.
The second, harder point is who gets left holding the bill. When a high-paying customer installs panels and stops buying much grid power, the fixed costs do not vanish. The wires, the transformers, the payments for idle power plants all still have to be paid, and they get spread across everyone still connected. Pakistani distribution companies already lose around 20 percent of power in transmission before any of this. The World Resources Institute describes high-paying customers leaving as collapsing utility revenues while dozens of gigawatts of fossil-fuel plants sit underused.
The people most exposed tend to be the ones who could never afford panels in the first place. The households escaping are, broadly, the ones with money and a roof they own. The households absorbing the shifted cost are, broadly, poorer and stuck on the grid. A story that reads as a green triumph at the national level is also, underneath, a transfer from those who can’t leave to those who can.
In February 2026, NEPRA replaced net metering with net billing for new customers, charging them the applicable retail tariff for electricity drawn from the grid while crediting exports at the lower national average energy purchase price.
Perhaps the wider lesson here is not really about solar. It is about what happens when leaving a shared system becomes cheaper than staying in it.
Pakistan didn’t design its rooftop boom. Its grid became expensive and unreliable enough that leaving was the rational move for anyone who could manage it, and many ran the numbers on their own and reached the same answer. When that gap opens, exit becomes the real policy, whatever the official rules say.
The wires are still there, still need paying for, and the people best able to keep funding them are the ones with the strongest reason to walk away.
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