Pakistan’s energy scenario is radically changing, and the seismic shift is not driven by large state projects but from millions of residential rooftops. Net-metered solar capacity is expected to reach 7,794MW by mid-2026, which will increase the national grid by 18% and exceeded the 2025 targets. Such a grassrootlevel power movement was enabled by a steep decline in panel prices and hassle-free licensing, that cuts the energy cost of households by one-third, helps to get rid of Rs.780 billion in circular debt, and provides a template for climate-vulnerable developing countries to pursue SDG7. It is not the elites who are benefiting from this, instead, it is the middle-class families and women entrepreneurs who are getting the most out of the situation, thus, bottom-up innovation operationalizing energy justice.
In the NEPRA context, homes set up solar panels (usually 5-10kW) and sell their excess electricity during the day at Rs22/unit while they buy electricity from the grid at night transferring the same amount. This credit system thus works as an offset to their electricity bills. The uptake was phenomenal, the installed capacity went from 1.3GW in the middle of 2023 to 4.1GW by the end of 2024, and the number of customers reached 283,000 among different sectors. January 2026 was marked with a 28% increase in net-metered generationcompared to the previous month, taking 2.95% of total power, amid falling global panel prices (an 18% drop) and State Bank financing schemes. This development led to the import of 13GW modules in 2024 alone, where the on-grid (6GW by 2026) and fast off-grid growth were mixed.
From an analytical point of view, fiscal reasoning is compelling. In FY 2024, the rapid adoption of solar energy reduced grid sales by 3.2 billion units, which caused a saving of Rs.101 billion in fuel imports and an indirect reduction of tariffs by Rs0.9/kWh for users of the remaining power supply; thus,directly engaging the Rs. 2.4 trillion circular debt cycle. In the provinces of Punjab and Sindh where power cuts used to last 12 hours a day, net-metering facilitates micro-grids’ stabilization, thus averting blackouts. Women-led cooperatives in rural Thar and Balochistan oversee the management of 20% of the installations, which is an indirect way of empowering women through the provision of reliable irrigation pumps that increase crop yields by 15% thereby contributing to the achievement of SDG5. The empirical gains are very visible: the share of net-metering in the grid has more than doubled from 0.6% in September 2024 to 1.1-3% by the beginning of 2026, with the total generation of 726 million units in 2024 alone (which is a 173% rise compared to the previous year).
However, the proposed gross-metering move by NEPRA for new consumers (Rs11.30/unit buyback) attempts to mitigate the winter overgeneration hazards when the usage falls to 8-9 GW. But certain measures in the form of smart meters and long-term contracts of seven years keep the process going on, while distributed generation strengthens resilience. On the global stage, Pakistan’s model is similar to that of Bangladesh’s solar home systems (6 million units) but is progressing rapidly due to the ability to adapt policies: the online approvals have reduced the processing time from 45 to 15 days.
Replicability is an asset for the entire Global South. Countries such as Kenya (which has rooftop solar contributing 5% to the grid) or India (with its 12GW distributed solar) have practically the same debt problems; on the contrary, Pakistan has shown that net-metering can go beyond fossils, thus, reducing the coal generation capacity by 4,625MW by FY26 while 50.5% of power is being generated through renewables. In areas affected by climate change, it is a combination of flexibility and adaptation: solar power surplus is being used for community batteries, which is like the post-flood recovery where the use of resilient designs reduced the cost by 30%. With the 2030’s target of 60% clean energy, exports through the SAARC grids could not only stabilize the neighbors but also turn scarcity of energy into shared wealth.
This public-driven initiative overthrows the power monopoly of conventional utilities by decentralizing the generation of electric power, thus empowering the households which have now found their way to the national supply and are dictating it to the extent of 3%, the shift goes from state control to the right of the citizen. Not like the top-heavy mega-dams that are susceptible to corruption scandals, the net-metering’s plug-and-play model is a middle-class agency’s phenomenon with 70% of the users to be salaried urbanite self-funders who are getting back their investment through a 3-year ROI and escaping the trap of bureaucratic aid. It smartly makes use of Pakistan’s 300+ sunny days to set up the “virtual power plants,” in which the joining rooftops automatically balance the peaks via IoT apps, making it comparable to billion-dollar grid improvements at one-tenth of the cost. By reducing import reliance on furnace oil (down 15% in FY25), it redirects the foreign currency from fossil fuel to renewable energy.
Therefore, policymakers must take more decisive steps: develop subsidies for united areas under Pakistan’s 2kW free electricity programs, create incentives for energy storage for 24/7 availability, and conduct IRENA conferences demonstrating the “solar surplus” of the country. Just when 2026 SDG midpoints are coming up, Pakistan’s transformation demonstrates that tech from the bottom up, combined with smart adaptive policy framework can provide equality much quicker than top-down assistance. Energy stories are being changed from houses in Karachi to deserts in Chagai, showing a self-sufficient future for the Global South.
Aiza Tanveer Iqbal is an Institutional Support Associate at UNDP Pakistan and an independent researcher on governance and climate policy.