Punjab's Rooftop Solar Boom Tests Pakistan's Energy Transiti

Punjab's rapid adoption of rooftop solar is putting Pakistan's claim of a 'just energy transition' to the test, as the province accounts for a major share of both the country's population and electricity consumption. The numbers tell a narrower story Pakistan calls its shift to rooftop solar a 'just energy transition'. Punjab is where that claim gets tested– because Punjab is not only the country's biggest user of electricity it's also, by a wide margin, the biggest adopter of solar. The question worth asking is whether those are the same story or two different ones under the same label. The claim: Punjab is leading the transition 52.9 percent of Pakistan's 241.5 million population lives in Punjab (2023 census), its five distribution companies– LESCO, FESCO, GEPCO, IESCO, MEPCO– sold 76.8 TWh of electricity in FY2024-25, out of 111.5 TWh sold nationally across all DISCOs and K-Electric combined. That's 68.8 percent of all electricity delivered through Pakistan's distribution system, going to just over half the country's population. The solution is not to slow down Pakistan's solar transition but to ensure that the benefits of solar energy are not limited to those who can afford to purchase their way out of rising electricity costs. This entails making financing for rooftop solar more available while also determining how the grid's fixed costs will be recovered as electricity sales decline. Pakistan must look beyond the number of megawatts installed and ask a harder question of who benefits from them and who is left to pay for the system, if it wants to call this a just energy transition Solar tells the clearer version of the same story. According to NEPRA's state of industry report 2025, of the 350,207 consumers connected to net-metering across Pakistan's distribution companies in FY2024-25, 327,341– 93.5 percent– are in Punjab's five DISCOs alone. On paper, it looks like Punjab is dragging the rest of the country into the solar era. The number that undercuts it: solar follows money, not need The bigger question is: who is actually installing these systems in Punjab? At current market pricing (solar manufacturer– Luminey), a basic 5kW rooftop solar setup (on-grid, no battery)– enough for a mid-sized house, costs around Rs 650,000 – Rs 850,000 installed. When compared to the average monthly household income in Pakistan, which is Rs 82,179 (Household Integrated Economic Survey 2024-25), that system costs between 7.9 – 10.3 months of a typical household's entire income. This isn't a hypothetical inequality. It shows up in Punjab's own statistics. The province's richest fifth of households earns 46.8 percent of all household income in Punjab; the poorest fifth earns just 6.5 percent– a more than sevenfold gap (HIES 2024-25). A solar system that costs eight to ten months' worth of the average household's income was never going to be evenly adopted across a gap that wide. This upfront cost was always going to make adoption easier for higher-income households. The hidden cost: someone must still pay for the grid Rooftop solar doesn't remove a household from the grid– it removes the household's financial contribution to the grid, while the household continues to benefit from a functioning transmission network and to draw backup power. The fixed costs of running that network– capacity payments and the transmission maintenance– don't decrease just because some consumers now buy less from it. That's where the second half of the story lives. Total distributed solar in Pakistan is now estimated at 38 GW, generating roughly 51 TWh a year– about 46 percent of what the entire grid supplies (Renewables First, Pakistan Electricity Review 2026). But only 6.8 GW of that is registered, tariff-adjusted net-metering capacity. The rest– around 31GW– is off-grid or behind-the-meter solar, which subtly reduces the demand that the grid was designed to meet without accompanying adjustment to who is responsible for paying its fixed costs. Those fixed costs are not shrinking in any durable way. According to NEPRA's SOI 2025, total capacity payments across the CPPA-G system were Rs. 1,807 billion in FY2024-25. This is a slight decrease from the past year, primarily due to the termination of a few contracts of IPPs that were chronically idle, but it is still around three times higher than what they were in FY2019–20 (Rs. 612 billion). Despite 5.3 percent consumer growth, national grid energy sales increased by just 1.7 percent in FY2024–2025. This is the strongest indication that a growing portion of Pakistan's actual electricity use is moving completely off the metered grid. NEPRA's own report states that falling grid demand is directly related to rising tariffs pushing consumers toward "conservation and solar alternatives.' As paying grid demand stagnates, the same fixed capacity bill gets divided among fewer consumers- a dynamic Pakistan Electricity Review by Renewables First describes as a distribution system built on "assumptions of sustained growth in volumetric sales" now being tested by a demand base that is quietly decoupling from it. The households and industries who could afford solar are shrinking their share of what they pay into the system. The costs of keeping that system operational do not disappear- they get redistributed onto whoever is left completely reliant on the grid: households that were never in a position to invest the majority of a year's income on rooftop panels in the first place. What fairness would actually require A transition that only counts megawatts installed will always look like progress. A transition measured by who installed them tells a different story- one where the same income divide that already exists between Punjab's household earnings (46.8 percent at the top, 6.5 percent at the bottom) is now being reproduced in who gets to avoid rising electricity costs and who is left to bear them. The solution is not to slow down Pakistan's solar transition but to ensure that the benefits of solar energy are not limited to those who can afford to purchase their way out of rising electricity costs. This entails making financing for rooftop solar more available while also determining how the grid's fixed costs will be recovered as electricity sales decline. Pakistan must look beyond the number of megawatts installed and ask a harder question of who benefits from them and who is left to pay for the system, if it wants to call this a just energy transition.