Imagine a shopkeeper in Hyderabad or a schoolteacher in Karachi who spends their life savings to install a few solar panels on their roof. They didn’t do it to become energy tycoons or to bankrupt the national grid. They did it because the electricity bill sitting on their kitchen table was eating up half their monthly salary.

For the last few weeks, all we have heard from Islamabad and policy circles is panic about “capacity payments” and the so-called “death spiral” of the grid. There are whispers of cutting net-metering rates and taxing those who dared to find a solution to their own misery. The state, it seems, is angry that its citizens became efficient.

This narrative that the solar-adopting middle class is the villain is not just lazy economics; it is cruel politics. You cannot force people to buy expensive electricity from an inefficient grid and then punish them when they find a cheaper........

© The Nation