Pakistan’s 22 GW Solar Shock: How a Fragile State Went Full Clean Energy - CleanTechnica

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/04/pakistans-22-gw-solar-shock-ho...


It’s more solar than Canada has installed in total. It’s more than the UK added in the past five years. And yet it didn’t make a blip in most Western media. While the U.S. continued its decade-long existential crisis about grid interconnection queues and Europe squabbled over permitting reforms, Pakistan skipped the drama and just bought the panels.

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How does a country once considered a textbook fragile state leapfrog into solar hyperscale? You can’t make sense of it without going back two decades. In the early 2000s, Pakistan was better known for insurgencies and instability than infrastructure upgrades. Terror attacks were frequent, electricity shortages were the norm, and governance was, to put it kindly, patchy. Political cycles flipped with the military’s mood, floods battered the countryside, and inflation hollowed out public services. Not exactly the backdrop for a clean tech success story.

But something changed. Slowly, unevenly, Pakistan started building institutional muscle. The terrorism that plagued the country for over a decade was brought under control through a combination of military operations and negotiated truces. Civilian governments, for all their dysfunction, managed peaceful handovers of power. The technocratic class—policy analysts, engineers, civil servants—began steering the country toward energy pragmatism. It wasn’t a revolution. It was governance on hard mode, with better outcomes.

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This isn’t just a solar story, though. Wind has been building quietly in the south for years, especially in the Gharo-Jhimpir corridor. Hydropower continues to play a big role, and bagasse from the sugar industry chips in some renewable electrons too. Battery storage is the next act, mostly in the form of hybrid inverters and lithium-ion packs tucked into homes and businesses. They aren’t grid-scale yet, but they’re everywhere you’d want resilience—factories avoiding outages, households tired of flickering bulbs. The pieces are in place for a distributed energy system that doesn’t wait for the grid to catch up. Which is good, because Pakistan’s grid is not remotely ready for this volume of variable generation. Utilities are already reeling from the revenue shock as high-value customers opt out of dependence. No one likes selling electrons when your best clients are making their own. That looming utility death spiral? It’s not theoretical in Lahore or Karachi.

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Pakistan’s electric vehicle transition is picking up momentum too, driven by a mix of foreign investment and homegrown innovation. Chinese companies have taken the lead in setting up large-scale operations, with firms like BYD announcing plans to open a production facility in Karachi and the ADM Group committing $350 million to build EV manufacturing capacity and install thousands of charging stations nationwide. These moves dovetail with Pakistan’s goal to convert 30% of all vehicles to electric by 2030.

But the real action is happening closer to the ground, where indigenous startups are rolling out electric two- and three-wheelers at a pace that could reshape urban mobility. Companies like Jolta Electric and Vlektra are assembling locally made e-motorcycles that target the country’s massive base of two-wheeler users—millions of whom rely on scooters and bikes for daily transport. With soaring petrol prices and worsening air quality in cities like Lahore and Karachi, these electric alternatives are fast becoming the obvious choice. The economics are simple: lower fuel costs, less maintenance, and in many cases, the ability to charge with rooftop solar. While car-scale EV adoption remains limited, the grassroots uptake of electric bikes and rickshaws—many of them assembled in Pakistan—is proving that the EV revolution here will likely be led from the bottom up.

Pakistan to cut power prices in a sign economy stabilising

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/pakistan-cut-power-tarif...

ISLAMABAD, April 3 (Reuters) - Pakistan will cut power prices for domestic and industrial users, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Thursday, in a sign of the economy's recovery from the brink of default.
The International Monetary Fund stepped in to stabilise the Asian country's finances with a standby arrangement in 2023 and then a $7 billion bailout last year.

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Lower power prices will be a relief to Pakistanis after several increases in the past couple of years.

Pakistan's $350 billion economy has been struggling since inflation rose to record high of 38.50% in May 2023, with growth turning negative, reserves shrinking to barely a couple of weeks of controlled imports, and interest rates jumping to 22%.
"We have successfully brought the inflation down to single digit," Sharif said, adding that the nearly 10-percentage-point reduction in the country's main interest rate in the last year would help businesses grow.

The tariff will be cut by an average 7.41 rupees ($0.0264) per kilowatt-hour to 34.47 rupees for domestic users, and by an average 7.59 rupees per kilowatt-hour to 40.60 rupees for industrial users, Sharif said.

How Pakistan quietly became world’s biggest solar importer | The Independent

Stuti Mishra

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/pakistan-solar-en...

There was no sweeping law, no global investment blitz, no prime minister announcing a green revolution. And yet, by the end of 2024, Pakistanimported more solar panels than almost any other nation in the world.

The South Asian country, facing economic challenges and high energypoverty, is witnessing one of the most unexpected clean energy success stories of the decade.

Pakistan has joined the ranks of the world’s leading solar markets, importing 17 gigawatts of solar panels last year alone, according to the Global Electricity Review 2025 by Ember, an energy think tank in the UK.

This surge represents a doubling of the previous year’s imports, and makes Pakistan one of the top global buyers of solar panels.

The scale of Pakistan’s imports is particularly striking because it is not driven by a national programme or utility-scale rollout.

Instead, the majority of the demand appears to come from rooftop solar installations by households, small businesses and commercial users looking to secure cheaper and more reliable electricity in the face of frequent power outages and rising energy costs.

According to Ember’s report, rooftop solar installations in homes and businesses in the country has soared as a “means of accessing lower-cost power”.

Pakistan’s experts echo this analysis.

Muhammad Mustafa Amjad, programme director at Renewables First, tells The Independent that the solar boom is best understood as a “survival response” by people and businesses that were “increasingly being priced out of the grid due to inefficient planning and unreliable supply”.

“It marks a structural shift,” he adds, “in how energy is perceived in Pakistan.”

Pakistan’s solar panel imports in fiscal year 2024 alone, Mr Amjad says, amount to roughly half of the national peak power demand.

“Rooftop solar is fast becoming the preferred energy provider,” he adds. “And the role of the grid has to massively adapt in order to remain relevant in a fast-transitioning energy economy.”

Ubaid Ullah, an energy expert in Karachi, argues that the energy transition is driven by people taking matters into their own hands.

“If you look at satellite images of any Pakistani city,” he tells The Independent, “all the roofs appear blue, covered in solar panels.”

In a region often plagued by grid instability, solar panels have emerged as a practical alternative to unreliable public supply. The sharp increase in imports in 2024 follows years of worsening power cuts, fluctuating tariffs, and high costs associated with diesel generators and imported fuels. Rather than waiting for national reforms, many Pakistanis began adopting solar technologies directly – often installing panels and inverters without much reliance on subsidies or centralised planning.

This makes Pakistan’s solar growth somewhat unusual in the global landscape.

In many countries, solar adoption has been closely tied to climate policy or international financing. Pakistan’s solar boom, in contrast, appears to be a response to market logic and local necessity, not climate diplomacy.

The Ember report notes that Pakistan's growth is happening largely “outside formal energy planning frameworks”.

Industry experts say there is minimal direct government intervention in Pakistan’s solar journey. In fact, the infrastructure is struggling to keep up.

While regulators have approved net metering policies and eased import restrictions in recent years, there have been no major public spending programmes or large-scale solar auctions to match the pace of adoption seen at the household or commercial level.

Despite importing record volumes of solar panels, Pakistan’s official grid-connected solar capacity remains far lower, indicating that much of the new solar is operating off-grid or behind the meter, where it escapes inclusion in national electricity statistics.