IN February, Nepra slashed — from around Rs26 per unit to as little as Rs8-11 — what new rooftop solar owners are paid for the electricity sent back to the grid under a new ‘net billing’ regime, ending a decade of crediting imports and exports equally. Fortunately, existing consumers were spared after public disapproval and reported government intervention. The government’s point is that solar owners, mostly well-off, avoid the fixed and capacity charges embedded in everyone else’s bill, leaving other consumers to cover them. That transfer reached roughly Rs159 billion by 2024 and could pass Rs4 trillion by 2034 if nothing changes. But buried in that logic is a striking admission that ordinary Pakistanis have quietly built something large enough to unsettle the grid and its economics.

They have built roughly 38 GW of distributed solar, more than 90 per cent of the country’s grid capacity. Solar power systems were installed rooftop by rooftop, 96pc funded by the people who installed them. In FY25, they generated an estimated 51 TWh, about 38pc of what the grid sold in the same period. The net billing debate has framed all of this as a liability to be contained by paying owners less. The more useful question is the one no one is asking: what if we stopped treating it as a problem and ran it as a power plant?

Right now, the 38 GW cannot be run as a power plant because they answer to no one. Millions of systems inject power when the sun is high and disappear when it sets. The load data shows it:........

© Dawn