From Ahmad Faruqui:

Can homes with solar+storage act as virtual power plants?

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/07/14/can-homes-with-solarstorage-...

Given California’s looming power shortages, a hypothesis has been put forward which would allow homes with solar+storage to be used as a virtual power plants (VPPs) when the grid encounters an emergency. A system-wide emergency would most likely arise during the peak period. Customers who would otherwise be avoiding the peak rate of 56 cents/kWh on the EV2-A rate by powering their home with the battery during such times would instead be paid $2 a kWh for exporting power from the battery to the grid.

This proposition sounds very attractive in theory. But will it pan out in practice? Using data from my house, I put it to a conceptual test on three dates. The first date is June 29 of this year. It was a mild weather day. My system of 25 panels (rated at 8 kW) produced 49.41 kWh’s that day. The house consumed 23.32 kWh’s. The balance was exported to the grid. I have paired my solar panels with an LG Chem battery rated at 9.8 kWh.

Let’s now look at August 14-15, 2020 when the grid in California did encounter a serious emergency. Hundreds of thousands of customers lost their power on those dates because the grid came up short. The weather was very hot in much of the state and central air conditioners in most if not all homes were running flat out. The skies were smoky, reducing the amount of solar generation, both central scale and at home. The wind was not blowing, reducing the amount of wind generation at central scale.

The grid came up short of power in the late afternoon and early evening hours. Homes such as mine did not have much of a surplus to send to the grid. I was actually concerned whether I had enough to keep my lights on in case the grid lost power. Why would I have exported power to the grid on either day?

On August 14, my system generated 32.79 kWh and the house consumed 63.12 kWh (even though I had adjusted the thermostat upwards by a couple of degrees). As seen in the graph, around 5 pm, the battery was unable to keep up with the consumption in my house. I started importing power from the grid. This would not have been the time to release whatever battery power I had remaining to the grid, regardless of the price being offered to me.

A similar situation was encountered on the next day, August 15, when my system generated 34.76 kWh and the house consumed 60.55 kWh. On neither day would I have wanted to export any power from the battery to the grid. Instead, I wished I could have tapped into the battery in my Tesla Model 3 that was parked in the garage. When fully charged, the car’s battery holds upwards of 70 kWh’s of energy. My wish could not be fulfilled because Tesla does not allow power to be pulled from the battery to power either the house (or to export it to the grid). Additionally, I would need to install a two-way charger rather than the one-way charger I currently have in the garage.


Of course, that’s just the data from my system. Other systems might behave differently. Diversity might exist across customers on mild-weather days. But are those the days when the grid will have an emergency? Probably not.

An emergency is likely to arise on days when everyone’s consumption is really high as it was on August 14-15, 2020. On such days, customers would be hard pressed to meet their own needs, let alone export power to the grid. Diversity would disappear.

What if the customer has multiple batteries paired to their panels? Won’t they may have an exportable surplus on emergency days? Yes, but that essentially means they had overinvested in batteries. How many customers would do that?

Pakistan's solar boom started to take off in 2023 when the price of solar panels from China dropped by more than 40%, as China ramped up its exports. Pakistani importers saw the potential to make a profit and bought them up en masse, selling them across the country. The solar transition further sped up in 2024, as the price of Chinese solar panels dropped even more, flooding the market with technology that many Pakistanis couldn't previously afford.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/08/21/g-s1-82369/s...

Adnan Shams, an electrician in Islamabad, says he has experienced the boom firsthand as more people call on him for solar installation. Earlier this summer, he attended a solar training course at National Skills University Islamabad, where the instructor taught students how to install panels. "[Solar] is beneficial in the long run, which is why the work is increasing," he says.



The proliferation of cheaper and more reliable batteries, used to store solar energy and also imported from China, now looks set to advance solar adoption as customers look for additional ways to reduce their bills and ensure a steady electricity supply.

Solar adoption reveals cracks in Pakistan's power system
But the millions of new solar users — like Zia and his neighbors — are having an impact on the financing of Pakistan's power sector.

That's because of reforms that date back to the 1990s. Pakistan was then struggling to produce enough electricity for its growing population. So the country set up long-term contracts to pay independent companies to produce electricity, regardless of how much is used.

These days, people are using less power from the Pakistani grid to avoid high electricity bills, says Rabia Babar, data manager at Renewables First. "The electricity cost in the country has increased so people are in conservation mode. They use less electricity to save [on] their electricity bills," she says.

As more Pakistanis add solar, demand for electricity from the grid has gone down, even though many still rely on the grid, especially at night.

As a result of this lessening demand and the government's continued obligation to independent power producers, "the same number of payments needs to be made by a lesser number of consumers," says Pakistan's energy minister, Awais Leghari.

He says the government is troubleshooting how to bring more industrial customers onto the grid to offset residential customers who are switching over to solar, while planning targeted subsidies for low-income users. "Our challenge is to get the demand to go up," he says.

Pakistan's capacity to generate electricity has also increased, with some residential and industrial solar producers selling the energy they make back to the grid by using net metering.

The Pakistani government has already taken several steps to regulate the residential solar industry, including lowering the rate it pays for electricity that household solar setups produce.

The rapid adoption of solar energy was initially encouraged by the government in power-starved Pakistan, but officials now fear it is spreading too quickly.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/08/24/pakista...

DHAKU, Pakistan — In Pakistan’s agricultural heartland, the solar energy boom is hard to miss.



Mosques have installed solar panels to keep prayer rooms lit; some factories are now powered exclusively by the sun; farmers are using the technology to transform once-barren land into lush fields.



“Even rich people are trying to become farmers now,” said Mohammed Latif, standing in his newly built house in Dhaku, a village in the eastern Punjab region. Installing a solar-powered pump last year allowed Latif to plant thriving rows of bell peppers on his formerly arid property. He made enough money to send one of his sons to study in Britain.



Latif, 68, could recall only one other societal “revolution” in his lifetime as dramatic as this one: the construction of the country’s highway system nearly four decades ago.

Two years ago, solar energy was the fifth-largest source of electricity in Pakistan. Now, it is alone at the top, accounting for around one-fourth of the national power supply. Its rapid adoption was initially welcomed by the government, which has long struggled to provide reliable power to its 240 million people, but officials now fear it is spreading too quickly and giving the rich an unfair advantage.



The boom began in 2023, when the price of solar panels plunged globally and imports from China surged. Wealthy Pakistanis, and farmers like Latif — encouraged by government subsidies — started buying them up in bulk. Now, many have gone off the aging and overburdened national grid entirely.



“I don’t blame them,” Pakistani Power Minister Awais Leghari said in an interview with The Washington Post. “It’s the price of electricity that has led to people getting out of the grid.”

But 45 percent of Pakistanis live below the poverty line, according to the World Bank, putting solar panel systems well beyond their reach. The pool of customers for the national grid has gotten smaller and poorer, and the costs of financing old coal-powered plants have increasingly been passed on to those who can least afford it.



Electricity prices roughly doubled between 2021 and 2024, before government intervention recently stabilized them. Many families say they have had to cut back on food and other essentials to pay their power bills.

“High-income consumers go solar while nonsolar users absorb the costs,” said Hasnat Khan, senior vice chairman of the Pakistan Solar Association. “It’s a death spiral.”



After decades of chronic shortages, Pakistan now has an excess of power-generating capacity, analysts say, and too many power plants.

The government argues that its expensive fossil fuel plants remain necessary. Whenever solar energy production falls on cloudy days, officials say, grid consumption still surges. If coal plants weren’t constantly running, they fear rolling blackouts would quickly become a feature of life again.



The quandary, according to analysts, is rooted in a lack of foresight.

Amid widespread power outages between the 1990s and early 2010s, which frequently caused economic paralysis, Pakistani authorities rushed to massively expand coal power production. The debt-burdened nation secured billions of dollars in loans, agreeing to pay for a set amount of production capacity — even if the electricity went unused, said Muhammad Basit Ghauri, a Pakistani energy analyst, describing the approach as “inefficient and mismanaged.”

Pakistan’s power sector is saddled with around $5.6 billion of debt, according to official figures. Leghari said the government has stanched losses by cracking down on electricity theft and collecting outstanding payments. But much of the burden has been passed on to consumers, fueling energy inequality — and what critics contend is a glaring double standard.