Pakistan’s solar miracle – how the hell did they do it? - The New World

Skip to main content

My account

Sign in

SubscribeJust £5 a month to join the movement

Buy a gift subscriptionAnd get 2 free passport holders

Hello. It looks like you’re using an ad blocker that may prevent our website from working properly. To receive the best experience possible, please make sure any ad blockers are switched off, or add https://experience.tinypass.com to your trusted sites , and refresh the page.

If you have any questions or need help you can email us.

In 2025, Pakistan imported more Chinese solar panels than any other country on earth. No subsidy programme drove it. There was no national rooftop scheme. No feed-in tariff. People just did it.

This is what makes this so remarkable: 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 deployment 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.

Pakistan, a country of around 241 million people with a long history of power cuts, now absorbs a remarkable share of China’s solar manufacturing output. 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, which makes Pakistan the second-largest importer of solar panels in the world in 2025.

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. This is not a story of big developers and utility contracts. It is millions of households deciding, one by one, that the grid is no longer worth waiting for.

Suggested Reading

Forget about privacy – unless you’re a billionaire

Ros Taylor

Pakistan’s solar boom is a story about broken trust in the grid. For decades the deal on offer was: pay for electricity, then often sit in the dark anyway. Load-shedding, the 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.

For years, the outages were blamed on a simple shortage: not enough power stations. That was once true. It is not any more. Pakistan now runs a capacity surplus of 10 to 12 gigawatts, and in 2024 its power plants ran at barely a third of their capacity.

The problem is no longer how much electricity the country can make. It is that it cannot afford to run the plants it has, or to deliver the power and collect the bills. Expensive imported fuel pushed generation costs up. Contracts with private producers guarantee them capacity payments whether their plants run or not. Those payments are 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.

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.

In Europe, by contrast, 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.

It was not only outages that drove solar demand. Electricity in Pakistan also became very expensive, very fast. The average effective tariff roughly tripled in a decade, from about 12.5 rupees per unit in 2015 to over 34 rupees in 2025. As mentioned, Pakistan’s power sector now carries a circular debt of well over...