Pakistan halved its solar export price. Only 3% of its solar is exported.
Pakistan has about 38 gigawatts of rooftop and off-grid solar; power companies have 8.3 gigawatts of it on their books.
Pakistan halved what its power companies pay households for exported rooftop solar in February 2026, from about PKR 26 for each unit to about PKR 13. A unit is one kilowatt-hour, the line that appears on an electricity bill, and PKR is the Pakistani rupee.
Almost none of Pakistan's solar power passes through that price. Rooftop and off-grid systems generated an estimated 51 billion units in the year to June 2025, and the state distribution companies bought 1.43 billion of them.
By our calculation that is 2.8 per cent, comparing the modelled solar generation in the report with the purchases the regulator reports. The rest was used where it was made, or never metered at all.
The solar nobody registered
Renewables First, an Islamabad think tank, puts Pakistan's total solar deployment at almost 38 gigawatts as of June 2025, roughly matching every conventional power station in the country put together.
Registered solar is a fraction of it. Net metering, where the meter runs backwards as a roof exports and the power company settles the difference, covered 8.3 gigawatts by December 2025, across 482,000 customers.
Exports from those customers came to 1 per cent of everything the distribution companies bought in the year to June 2025, even after the volume more than tripled.
What the new price is pegged to
Pakistan calls the new arrangement net billing: a household's exports are bought at one price and its imports sold at another. The export side is pegged to the national average energy purchase price, the fuel half of what it costs to generate a unit, which came to PKR 9.04 in the year to June 2025.
The other half is the capacity purchase price: the fixed payments owed to power plants whether or not they run. That reached PKR 14.21 a unit, and made up 61 per cent of what the power companies spent on electricity.
The regulator has a case for the split. A household generating its own power spares the system fuel while the fixed payments to idle plants carry on regardless, so paying it the fuel price alone is defensible. The household then buys back at the full retail price, which carries both halves and the cost of the wires on top.
Muhammad Uzair Yousuf of NED University in Karachi puts the loss at 44 to 49 per cent of the value of a household's rooftop generation, for a household that uses 40 per cent of what it makes and exports the rest. His paper is open access in the journal Next Energy.
For a household exporting 100 units a month (our arithmetic): about PKR 2,600 at the old rate, about PKR 1,300 at the new one. Over a year the gap is about PKR 15,600.
Where the policy lands
The export price only reaches people who signed a net-metering contract. Renewables First calls the unregistered systems the largest and least visible part of the shift, and the new rate leaves them alone, because they never sold a unit to anybody.
Yousuf told pv magazine that battery incentives must "avoid encouraging complete grid defection". A worse export rate and cheaper batteries point the same way: use more of your own power, sell less. If enough households take that route, the power companies lose the customers and keep the fixed costs, which land on the bills of everyone still buying from the grid.
Existing contract holders were spared. After a public backlash, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif reversed an attempt to move them onto the lower rate, and the regulator put out a draft amendment letting them keep their current export tariff until their agreement expires.
What this means in India
India pays for rooftop solar at the front end instead. Under PM Surya Ghar, the rooftop subsidy scheme, the central money reaches a household's bank account only after an empanelled vendor installs the system and the state power company verifies it, so the local utility has a record of every subsidised roof before any money moves.
Pakistan's fleet grew on imported panels that mostly stayed off those records, and the regulator is now setting a price that most of those panels will never see.
Pakistan is arguing about the price of exported solar in a country where almost none of the solar is exported.
What we could not confirm
- Is the rate paid to a household signing up today PKR 13 a unit, or the PKR 9.04 purchase price the regulations point to?
- How many of the 482,000 net-metering customers have enlarged their systems and lost their old terms?
- Was the draft amendment protecting existing contracts finalised, and on what terms?
The document
Pakistan Electricity Review 2026, published by Renewables First, Islamabad, written by Huma Naveed and Nabiya Imran, 56 pages: https://uploads.renewablesfirst.org/Pakistan%20Electricity%20Review%202026.pdf
The reform itself is the NEPRA (Prosumer) Regulations, 2026, notified as S.R.O. 251(I)/2026 and in force from 9 February 2026, issued by the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority, Islamabad.
Sources
- Renewables First, Pakistan Electricity Review 2026: https://uploads.renewablesfirst.org/Pakistan%20Electricity%20Review%202026.pdf
- Muhammad Uzair Yousuf, "From net metering to net billing: Insights from Pakistan's 2026 prosumer regulatory reform", Next Energy, volume 13, article 100871, CC BY 4.0: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nxener.2026.100871
- pv magazine, "Pakistan's net billing reform sheds light on deeper power sector issues", 19 August 2026: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/08/19/pakistans-net-billing-reform-sheds-light-on-deeper-power-sector-issues/
- pv magazine, "Pakistan blocks retroactive export rate cut in net billing shift", 25 February 2026: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/02/25/pakistan-blocks-retroactive-export-rate-cut-in-net-billing-shift/
- Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Grid Connected Rooftop Solar Programme: https://mnre.gov.in/en/grid-connected-solar-rooftop-programme/
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