For years, Pakistan has been sold a comforting lie: build more gigawatts, sign more power purchase deals, throw money at new plants, and the lights will stay on. Today, we sit on over 46 GW of installed capacity, paying billions in capacity charges while families endure six to eight hours of daily load-shedding and industry faces peak shortfalls of thousands of megawatts. This is not a generation shortage. It is a transmission and distribution catastrophe. We are paying for plenty and living in darkness.

The real engineering challenge that most solar advocates miss is this: electricity is not just “power”. It comes in two inseparable parts—real power (P) and reactive power (Q). Think of it like water flowing through pipes to your home. Real power (P) is the actual water that does the useful work—lighting your bulb, spinning your fan, running your factory motor.

That is what you pay for on your electricity bill, measured in megawatts. But to keep that water flowing smoothly without the pipes bursting or the pressure collapsing, you also need “pressure” in the system. That pressure is reactive power (Q). It creates the magnetic fields inside motors, transformers, and transmission lines that allow real power to travel long distances without voltage dropping too low.

Without enough Q, voltage sags, equipment trips offline, and even abundant real power becomes useless. Traditional coal, nuclear, and gas plants produce both P and Q naturally as by-products of spinning turbines. Solar panels and wind turbines are excellent at generating real power (P) during daylight hours, but they provide almost none of the reactive power (Q) on their own unless fitted with expensive additional equipment.

Battery storage can help shift some daytime solar to evening peaks and supply limited reactive support, but these systems are prohibitively expensive at the scale Pakistan needs—costing billions upfront with imported technology and materials. Our fiscal constraints make it nearly impossible to deploy nationwide. That is the hidden complexity behind the solar boom.

Panels flood the grid with cheap daytime P, flattening demand and creating the deadly “duck curve”—a steep evening ramp when the sun sets, factories switch on, and air conditioners run at full blast. Suddenly, the grid must deliver massive real power with almost no reactive support, causing voltage instability, transmission bottlenecks, and blackouts.

In Pakistan, this plays out every day. Southern coal, nuclear, and solar plants churn out power, but the north—where most demand sits—cannot receive it reliably. The Matiari–Lahore HVDC line, built to carry 4,000 MW, is throttled by stability limits, reactive deficits, and inertia shortfalls. Industrial motors trip. Factories shut. Exports suffer. This is why we still burn expensive furnace oil while “paid-for” plants sit idle.

Pouring public money into scattered solar and batteries without first fixing the wires is like buying more buckets while the pipes are leaking everywhere

Pouring public money into scattered solar and batteries without first fixing the wires is like buying more buckets while the pipes are leaking everywhere

Critics play devil’s advocate and ask: Why not simply have the government invest heavily in solar panels and batteries? After all, industrial consumption accounts for only about 26–27 per cent of total electricity use, with households making up nearly half. Some even argue we should focus industrialisation efforts in Sindh and other southern provinces to consume cheap local generation (Thar coal, nuclear, solar) right at the source, reducing the north–south transmission headache.

These ideas sound appealing on the surface. Pakistan’s people-led solar revolution has already cushioned the economy against fuel import shocks and lowered bills for millions of households. Batteries could, in theory, store excess daytime power for evening peaks. And shifting industry southward would logically balance the load closer to the generation hubs.

But the hard realities of physics, finance, and geography make these partial fixes dangerously incomplete. Solar panels without massive grid upgrades worsen the duck curve, leading to daytime curtailment and evening shortfalls. Batteries remain prohibitively costly at utility scale—requiring tens of billions in foreign exchange for imported lithium-ion systems, plus new infrastructure for safety testing and recycling that Pakistan barely possesses.

The government's push for more solar has already accelerated policy flip-flops on net metering and buyback rates, yet they do nothing to fix voltage instability or reactive power deficits. Industrialising Sindh is a smart policy for regional balance, but it cannot magically eliminate nationwide theft, 17.6 per cent T&D losses, or the fragmented DISCO governance that plagues every province.

A southern industrial boom still needs a stable, unified national grid to export surplus power, attract foreign investment, and prevent the same voltage collapses that currently throttle existing southern plants. Pouring public money into scattered solar and batteries without first fixing the wires is like buying more buckets while the pipes are leaking everywhere.

The bleeding is quantifiable and criminal. In recent years, distribution companies have lost hundreds of billions annually to excess transmission and distribution losses (far above regulatory benchmarks) and poor recoveries—a combined hit feeding a circular debt that now hovers around Rs 1.9 trillion. The system is not broken by accident; it is designed for theft, leakage, and political patronage.

The conventional wisdom—repeated in every donor prescription and policy paper—is to privatise the distribution companies one by one. Sell off LESCO, MEPCO, and PESCO piecemeal. Let private owners cherry-pick the profitable urban circles while rural networks rot. This is not reform. It is fragmentation dressed as progress.

It is time to stop worshipping the piecemeal privatisation mantra and start building the one institution capable of fixing the wires that actually matter

It is time to stop worshipping the piecemeal privatisation mantra and start building the one institution capable of fixing the wires that actually matter

It will never mobilise the tens of billions of dollars required for nationwide smart metering, reactive compensation devices, HVDC reinforcements, grid-forming inverters, or large-scale battery storage. Separate owners cannot coordinate a national voltage profile. They cannot plan a unified strategy for reactive power support. They will simply extract profits from the easiest 30 per cent of consumers and leave the rest to the state.

There is a better way—the only way that matches the scale of the crisis.

Create a single, country-wide National Distribution Company—excluding only Karachi Electric, which already operates under a proven private concession—structured as a bold public–private partnership. Private capital and professional management run the show day to day; the state provides sovereign backing, right-of-way authority, and regulatory certainty. Think South Korea’s KEPCO model, adapted to Pakistan’s realities.

KEPCO is no outdated monopoly. It is a government-majority corporation that owns and operates the entire national transmission and distribution network, yet partners aggressively with private players for technology, financing, and distributed energy resources. It has poured tens of billions into grid modernisation—long-term distribution plans, smart infrastructure, and flexibility services that integrate massive renewables without voltage collapse. The result is world-class reliability, rapid renewable integration, and a grid that actually delivers power where the economy needs it. South Korea did not fragment its network into ten feuding utilities. It built a national backbone strong enough to carry the future.

A national public–private partnership distribution company would achieve what fragmented privatisation never can. It would mobilise $10–20 billion in private and multilateral capital over a decade through listed bonds, green sukuks, and strategic foreign investment—money no single provincial entity or cherry-picked DISCO could ever raise.

It would deploy smart grids, advanced metering infrastructure, and AI-driven loss detection at a true national scale, slashing technical and commercial losses below 10 per cent within five years. It would finance and install the critical reactive power infrastructure—synchronous condensers, STATCOMs, grid-forming inverters, and battery energy storage systems—so voltage remains stable from Thar to Peshawar and the north can finally draw on the cheap southern power it is already paying for. And it would end the north–south transmission lottery and the evening ramp roulette that is strangling industry, while enabling balanced industrial growth in Sindh and beyond.

This is not a theory. It is the only pragmatic path out of the paradox. The alternative is more of the same: endless bailouts, higher tariffs that fuel theft and self-generation, more diesel captive plants, and de-industrialisation by a thousand cuts. While we argue over who owns the wires, China powers its industrial machine with a fuel mix still anchored in coal (around 55 per cent of generation) and rapidly expanding nuclear capacity—delivering the reactive power and inertia that renewables alone cannot—while scaling solar and wind faster than any nation on earth. Other countries build ironclad grids that turn generation capacity into actual economic growth.

The politicians who keep kicking this can down the road are not protecting public assets. They are presiding over the slow strangulation of Pakistan’s economy. It is time to stop worshipping the piecemeal privatisation mantra and start building the one institution capable of fixing the wires that actually matter.

A National Distribution Company under a competent public–private partnership is not an ideology. It is engineering realism married to financial necessity. Pakistan does not lack power plants. It lacks the courage to fix the grid that connects them.

The question is no longer whether we can afford to do this. The question is whether we can afford not to.

© The Friday Times