Pakistan’s solar revolution is changing shape, and the speed of that change is becoming difficult to ignore.
The latest import numbers make the point starkly. In 1QFY27, Pakistan imported around $405 million worth of solar panels and $182 million of lithium-ion batteries. Put differently, for every $2.2 spent on solar panels, the country now spends a dollar on batteries. Just two years ago, that ratio was $44 of solar panels for every dollar of battery.
The first phase of Pakistan’s solar revolution was about generation. Consumers bought panels to produce cheaper electricity during the day and reduce their dependence on an increasingly expensive grid. The economics were helped by a collapse in global panel prices, which made rooftop solar accessible at an extraordinary pace.
That phase is not over. In fact, panel imports have recovered after losing momentum earlier this year. But something else is happening alongside it. Storage is catching up at a remarkable speed.
And this matters because batteries change the relationship with the grid.
Solar panels reduce grid consumption when the sun is shining. Batteries allow that solar generation to be carried into the evening. The distinction is fundamental. The former changes the volume of electricity bought from the grid. The latter starts changing when, and potentially how often, electricity is bought from it.
Pakistan has already imported close to 60,000MW of solar panel capacity. That is an enormous installed or installable base waiting to be paired with storage. The country’s officially net-metered capacity remains only a small fraction of this number, underscoring how much of the solar market has developed outside the formal grid-connected framework.
The next leg therefore does not require another panel boom of the scale seen in 2023 and 2024. Much of the hardware is already sitting on rooftops. What it needs is cheaper storage.
And storage is precisely where the economics are moving.
Solar module prices appear to have become relatively sticky around $0.10 to $0.11 per watt. The spectacular price declines that fuelled the first wave are becoming harder to replicate. Batteries are a different story. Prices are already at historically low levels, while improvements in cell chemistry, manufacturing scale, energy density and battery management systems offer further room for decline.
That creates a powerful combination. The cost of generating solar electricity has already fallen enough to make the technology compelling. The falling cost of storage is now making it increasingly possible to use that electricity when it is actually needed.
Regulation will alter the route, but perhaps not the destination.
The old net-metering regime has effectively given way to a new presumed framework, with the economics of exporting surplus electricity materially different from before. That should slow the growth of conventional grid-connected solar at the margin. But it may also strengthen the case for batteries.
If exporting excess solar becomes less valuable, consuming it yourself becomes more valuable.
That means the end of the old net-metering model may not mark the end of the solar revolution. It could accelerate its next phase.
Demand is no longer a simple function of economic growth, temperature and industrial activity. Millions of consumers are acquiring the ability to generate and increasingly store electricity themselves. The shape of demand through the day is changing. The evening peak, once a fairly predictable feature of the system, could increasingly become a contest between grid supply and distributed storage.
For planners, this is a much more complicated problem than simply forecasting how many megawatts of solar will be installed.
The question is now how much of that solar will remain grid-dependent, how much will be paired with batteries, when those batteries will charge and discharge, and what that means for the utilisation of the network and conventional generation fleet.
Pakistan was late in recognizing the scale of the first solar wave. It cannot afford to repeat that mistake with storage.
The 1QFY27 numbers suggest the next disruption is no longer knocking on the door. It is already entering through the front door. The challenge now is to plan for it before the market once again makes the planning obsolete.