Pakistan: the solar revolution nobody planned

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Pakistan: the solar revolution nobody planned<br>The fastest distributed-solar rollout in the world happened almost entirely by accident.

Jan Rosenow<br>Jun 07, 2026

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Pakistan imported more Chinese solar panels than any other country on earth in 2025 (except for the Netherlands through the port of Rotterdam but destined for across the EU). No subsidy programme drove it. No national rooftop scheme. No feed-in tariff. People just did it.<br>The satellite image below shows the scale of change in a powerful way: Same rooftops in 2021 and 2025. Within the matter of 3 years rooftop solar has grown exponentially now visible from space (using Google Earth images).

We are used to energy transitions that happen because governments engineer them, with incentives and mandates and targets. Pakistan’s solar boom is the opposite. It is probably the fastest deployments of distributed solar anywhere in the world, and it happened largely in spite of the state rather than because of it. But Pakistan is also a cautionary tale for what happens in an unmanaged transition and by no means is this a blueprint for other countries to follow. But it shows just how rapidly solar can be deployed around the world.<br>An important note: I am NOT a Pakistan energy expert and this is very much someone looking in from the outside from high altitude. I hope that I got most of what I write here right but appreciate feedback and will include nuance where it is needed.<br>The numbers behind the story<br>Pakistan imported roughly 7.6 GW of solar panels in 2023, then 16.4 GW in 2024, then 16.9 GW in 2025. Around 55 GW have now arrived in total. That makes Pakistan the second-largest importer of solar panels in the world in 2025. Pakistan, a country of around 241 million people with a long history of power cuts, now absorbs a remarkable share of everything China’s solar industry makes.

And it is showing up in the grid data. By the summer of 2025, solar had become Pakistan's single largest source of electricity, generating around a quarter of the total during peak months. Official numbers understate the boom of solar because most of the panels were installed on rooftops and behind meters, in a distributed system no one is fully measuring.

Most of that hidden capacity is overwhelmingly residential. Of an estimated 33 GW of distributed solar, around half sits on the roofs of homes, with the rest split across industry, agriculture and commerce. Contrary to it being a story of big developers and utility contracts it is millions of households making the switch.

Why it happened<br>A key reason for the boom of solar in Pakistan is about resilience and grid reliability. Load-shedding, the scheduled rationing of power when supply cannot meet demand, has been a daily fact of life in Pakistan. How long the lights stay off depends on where you live, and the gap between a wealthy Islamabad suburb and rural Balochistan is enormous.<br>For years the outages were blamed on capacity shortages and not enough power stations. That was once true but it is not any more. Pakistan now runs a capacity surplus and in 2024 its power plants ran at barely a third of their capacity.<br>There is a long chain of interlinkages that exacerbate the problem of missing money as an excellent academic study analyses in great detail: Expensive imported fuel pushed generation costs up. Contracts with private producers guarantee them capacity payments whether their plants run or not, now around 2.5 trillion rupees a year for electricity that is often never generated. The public utilities cannot recover enough to cover those bills, so the debt piles up into a circular debt of close to 2 trillion rupees. Faced with that, the system rations supply, cutting power longest where losses are highest and bill payment is lowest.<br>Scheduled outages in April this year were permitted by the regulator for several hours a day - now a common feature in Pakistan. The distribution companies serving Islamabad and Karachi keep cuts to a handful of hours a day. In Sukkur and Quetta, rural customers can be without power for up to two-thirds of the day. The chart below shows the spread across the country’s main distribution companies, and the gulf between urban and rural service ( I could not get hold of the 2025 data yet but here is the April 2026 data).

To see how extreme this is, hold it against Europe and the US: In Europe, customers typically face around a few minutes of outages per year (both planned and unplanned). The average American, battered by hurricanes in 2024, lost about 11 hours over twelve months, and closer to two hours in a normal year. In some parts of Pakistan people can lose more than that before lunchtime. A household in Quetta can face 16 to 20 hours of outages in a single day. When that is the alternative, a roof full of panels and a battery offers energy resilience.<br>But not only outages drove solar demand....