Pakistan’s Solar Revolution
Sam Wilson (left) and Ed Wilson (right), with some of the tower blocks of Islamabad in the background
I recently returned from a trip to Pakistan, where I was visiting my brother and fellow Borrowed Earth founder Sam, who has lived in Islamabad since 2022, working on Pakistan’s education sector and writing and mentoring The Borrowed Earth Projects research grantees. You can find our dedicated Pakistan page of blogs here.
The trip was incredible for many reasons, from being able to see Sam’s life first-hand for the first time since he moved out there, to the fantastic food, meeting his friends and seeing the sights of the cities and Margalla Hills.
But I am an unabashed energy nerd, and among the landscapes, food stalls, colourful trucks and sights of Pakistan something caught my eye that I had heard mentioned in passing a few of my go-to energy podcasts, and that was the proliferation of rooftop solar panels.
They were everywhere.
I first spotted them glinting from rooftops as we drove from Islamabad International Airport into downtown, through the suburbs of the capital. This is not a wealthy part of town, as you drive the suburbs are named with progressively lower number the closer they get to the Government buildings themselves. Out here we were driving past G-13, G-12, G-11, far from G-5 and the Prime Minster’s house, and yet as far as the eye could see there were rooftop solar panels.
This proliferation did not reduce when we drove around the fancier parts of town either. I saw panels on the mansions of gated communities where foreign diplomats and government ministers live, they were on hospitals, and even the Interior Department building.
Later in the trip we travelled to Karachi, where the same thing was visible. In some of the hastily erected slum areas the number of roofs with panels did drop off compared to Islamabad and the wealthier parts of town, but they were still a very common sight. A lot of the installations were recent, Sam’s landlord was literally installed panels on the roof of his house while I stayed there.
Rooftop panels on a neighbours house, Islamabad
I had heard that a solar boom was underway but I hadn’t read much about it, so I did some digging, and this is what I found.
The proliferation of rooftop solar is a relatively recent phenomenon in Pakistan, really taking off in the last year or so, and can be traced to three main drivers:
cheap panels from China,
a weak Pakistani Rupee,
and popular reluctance to paying rapidly rising energy bills.
So what state is the energy sector in?
Sadly, Pakistan’s energy sector has been plagued by underinvestment and mismanagement for many years. It is heavily reliant on imports of oil and coal, despite largely untapped coal and hydropower natural resources in the country itself. Utilities are plagued by circular debt. In 2019, 56 million people didn’t have access to electricity (2019 – Our World in Data). In 2013, transmission losses (electricity wasted in the power lines between the generating plants and the end users) were reportedly as high as 30%.
From 2021 to 2024, the price of electricity increased by 155%. IMF conditions on a $7 bn loan in 2024 were dependent on tariff hikes, that prompted street protests in July 2024. In July 2024, the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) announced another price hike of roughly 51%. For many people the cost of their electricity bill is more than their rent, and so many people simply don’t pay their electricity bills and demand for electricity from the grid has slumped.
The results of this lack of investment in energy infrastructure in the poorer parts of the country was visible on our trip to Karachi in particular, where the street pylons are a sight to behold. It seems everyone simply connects their own lines to the poles and routes them to their apartments and houses, resulting in wire spaghetti on every street corner.
Karachi lampposts
There is simply not enough electricity generation, stable transmission, reliable connections and well-funded and well-run utilities to provide the electricity people need. As a result, brownouts and power outages are just part of life, even in the capital city, and have a real impact on economic activity and people’s everyday lives.
Solar prices drop
In the meantime, the cost of making solar panels in China has plummeted. The price of a Photovoltaic (PV) module reduced by 40% from 2023 to 2024 alone, and huge manufacturing capacity has led to a large oversupply of panels. Add this to a weak Pakistani rupee and you have the recipe for flooding of the market.
These forces have combined to lead to a boom in the installation of private rooftop solar panels across homes and businesses in Pakistan. In the first half of 2024, 13GW of solar panels were imported from China alone, up from a total of 3.5 GW in 2023. For context, Hinkley Point C is a 3.6 GW nuclear plant, and the UK has 17 GW of solar capacity installed today. So Pakistan imported 4 nuclear plants worth of solar panels in 6 months.
The results of this boom, which incidentally has been almost exclusively market led with little to no government support, can be looked at in a number of ways.
On the one hand, it is clearly a good thing for the individual households, they reduce their astronomical energy bills, they are less likely to suffer outages during the day, and as a whole CO2 emissions will reduce.
From a climate perspective, clearly more renewable energy is a good thing. Pakistan has been particularly badly hit by climate-related extreme weather events, from the floods in 2022, to a record heatwave in 2024.
Pakistan really is on the front lines of climate induced impacts (See right) and the recent Climate Risk Index 2025 showed Pakistan as the most affected country in the world in 2022.
Despite only generating 0.5% of global emissions it could show a path of decarbonisation to other developing countries, particularly India, that could have a real impact on global emission trajectories.
Debt Spirals
For the power generators and utilities, however, this produces a real problem, that of a potential downward debt spiral.
These companies are already heavily in debt. They do not recoup enough money from their customers to match their expenses as it is, and the sheer number of people leaving the grid to use their own power will reduce the number of people paying their bills even more.
For people still connected to the grid who don’t or can’t use their own solar, this will likely mean prices will go up even more.
For the government, it means the amount of revenue they can generate from taxes from these utilities and developers will reduce.
In the end, Pakistan is essentially in the middle of an experiment in the unplanned proliferation of decentralised clean energy generation on an unstable and poorly managed electricity grid.
To respond, grid operators will have to quickly adjust to their customers now being power producers of their own, and show flexibility as the shift from large centralised power plants to decentralised power happens in real time. If they cannot adjust quickly enough, and work out how they can get a steady income from the new reality, the already stressed electricity grid may falter altogether. South Africa is a case study in a non-functioning grid (also partially caused by issues with energy corruption) that no country wants to follow. As an aside, China’s role as both a promoter of thermal generation power plants and exporter of the solar panels will be fascinating to watch.
To some it may seem like the importance of the future of Pakistan’s electricity grid pales is a minor issue compared to the host of other problems facing the country. But it remains a fascinating test case of how the energy transition is playing out in the developing world.
The most optimistic outlook is that this wave of solar alleviates the pressures on everyday Pakistani’s, allows for more people to save more money on their bills, helps fight climate change, and doesn’t crash the grid. Inshallah.
Further Reading
The Great Solar Rush in Pakistan. Renewables First
Pakistan is experiencing a solar power boom. Here's what we can learn from it. WEF.
Further LIstening
Pakistan’s Solar Boom - Volts Podcast. David Roberts interviews Mustafa Amjad, program director at Renewables First, an energy think tank based in Islamabad and Waqas Moosa, current chair of the Pakistan Solar Association and the CEO of Hadron Solar.