Drive through Lahore, Karachi or Peshawar today and the rooftops tell their own story: blue panels catching sunlight over car parks, small factories, shopfronts, entire housing colonies. Ask around and most people will tell you Pakistan is in the middle of an energy transition. Look more closely and a harder question surfaces: are we transforming the power system, or are millions of consumers simply finding a private way out of a grid whose tariffs they can no longer afford? That distinction matters more than it sounds. Putting a panel on your roof and rebuilding a national electricity system are related projects, but they are not the same project. One is a household decision, made in a weekend. The other is the work of a decade: generation, transmission, storage and markets, rebuilt around cheaper and cleaner power instead of imported fuel. Pakistan has made real progress on the first. It has barely begun the second, and that gap between the two is exactly where the country’s energy debate has gotten stuck. An energy transition, properly understood, means replacing the foundations of how power is made, moved, stored and sold, not simply adding panels on top of a system built for a different age. Done properly, solar, hydel, wind and battery storage stop being add-ons and become the backbone the grid is designed around. That shift cuts fuel imports, lowers emissions, strengthens energy security, and eventually brings costs down for everyone connected to the grid, whether they own a panel or not. None of that follows automatically from rooftops getting brighter. Pakistan does not need convincing that solar works. Rooftop adoption alone has already made that argument. What it needs now is the less visible work: a functioning trading market, transmission built out to the country’s best solar sites, storage procured alongside generation instead of after it, and financing terms credible enough to bring capital in at a fair price. And Pakistan’s rooftops have gotten very bright, very fast. Research from the Policy Research Institute for Equitable Development and Renewables (PRIED) puts distributed rooftop capacity somewhere between 33 and 38 gigawatts by the middle of this year; almost all of which is built on individual decisions rather than national planning. PV Magazine, media platform for the solar and energy storage industries, has tracked roughly 51. 5 gigawatts of solar modules imported into the country since 2023, making Pakistan one of the largest buyers of solar hardware anywhere in the world. No mean achievement, this. It says something about ordinary households and small businesses that, offered a way out of punishing electricity bills, they took it and ran away with it. But follow the electricity to where it actually goes. Since the shift from net metering to net billing this year, most new rooftop systems are built to serve the building they sit on, increasingly paired with batteries for self-consumption rather than exporting power back into the grid. Their impact shows up on low-voltage wires, 11 kV feeders and neighbourhood transformers, not on the national transmission network. This is not a flaw in rooftop solar. It was simply never designed to do the job utility-scale generation does: providing power that a grid operator can forecast, dispatch and plan around. The result is a real paradox. As more Pakistanis produce their own power during the day, the grid still has to maintain the same plants, wires, substations and reserve capacity for everyone else, even while its daytime sales, and the revenue that pays for all of it, keep shrinking. Distribution companies end up carrying nearly the same fixed costs on a shrinking customer base, and that concern does not disappear just because it is no longer visible on anyone’s rooftop. Utility-scale solar, plants that feed directly into the national grid rather than a single rooftop, is the piece still missing. It can be sited deliberately, in the high-irradiation belts of southern Punjab, Balochistan and Sindh, and connected to the transmission backbone instead of a local feeder. That lets planners forecast what it will produce and when, something no number of scattered rooftop decisions can offer. It displaces imported coal, furnace oil and LNG at a cost per unit that keeps falling, which helps not only households that can afford their own panels but everyone still paying the standard tariff. China, India, Australia and the UAE, different as they are, have all shown the same pattern: utility-scale and rooftop solar growing side by side, thermal generation shrinking as a share of the mix rather than vanishing overnight. None of it works without storage. Solar alone is a daytime resource inside a system that needs power around the clock. Battery storage built alongside utility-scale plants can hold power for the evening peak, absorb sudden drops in output when clouds roll in, and supply the frequency regulation and reserve capacity that thermal plants currently provide almost by default. That is what lets a grid take on a much larger share of renewables without the lights dying every time weather changes over Multan or Peshawar. Pair storage with generation from the start, and flexibility stops being thermal power’s job alone. Why, then, has so little of this actually been built? Start with the Competitive Trading Bilateral Contract Market, the reform meant to open the door to independent power producers and let electricity trade on genuinely competitive terms. Years of delay in bringing it online have left developers unsure what market they would even be entering. Add to that the understandable but shortsighted anxiety inside government: with rooftop solar already eating into daytime demand and the system currently sitting on surplus capacity, officials are wary of approving still more generation. That caution looks like prudence, but it confuses today’s temporary glut with tomorrow’s demand, which Pakistan’s own planning documents say is coming regardless. The Integrated Generation Capacity Expansion Plan assumes GDP growth rising from about 4% in FY2025 to 5. 8% by 2035. Power plants take years to plan, finance and build. Waiting for the surplus to disappear before breaking ground only guarantees a shortage later, financed at a worse price than today’s. If the technology and the case for it are this settled, the real obstacle is money, or rather the terms on which Pakistan can borrow it. Four risks sit on top of every utility-scale solar proposal here: Offtaker risk: will the buyer actually pay on time, given the state’s long and unresolved history of circular debt? Currency risk: loans arrive in dollars while revenue comes in rupees, and every devaluation widens that gap. Regulatory risk: will the tariff and contract terms a developer signs today still hold decades into the life of the project? Sovereign risk: raises the cost of capital for every project regardless of how sound it is on its own. Solar panels have never been cheaper. In Pakistan, the money to build with them has rarely been more expensive, and that gap is what is actually holding the sector back. Pakistan does not need convincing that solar works. Rooftop adoption alone has already made that argument. What it needs now is the less visible work: a functioning trading market, transmission built out to the country’s best solar sites, storage procured alongside generation instead of after it, and financing terms credible enough to bring capital in at a fair price. Get these four things right and utility-scale solar stops being the missing piece and becomes what it should already be: the backbone of a grid that finally earns the word transition. The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.
Rooftop solar isn’t energy transition
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