In the middle of the heat of 40 degrees which paralyzed the coastal city of Karachi in April, Saad Saleem castigated its air conditioning with a quasi-abandon.
Electricity prices have increased, but the wealthy entrepreneur has been unwacted since he spent $ 7,500 to install solar panels on the roof of his bungalow as part of a solar boom in Pakistan.
Saleem bought its modules two years ago, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and economically besieged Pakistan hammered a preliminary rescue program. As part of the agreement, Pakistan has greatly increased electricity and gas prices to support suppliers in difficulty in the highly unscathed sector.
Pakistani are now paying more than a quarter more on average for electricity, by triggering a race to install solar modules.
Last year, Solaire represented more than 14% of Pakistan’s power supply, compared to 4% in 2021 and the displacement of coal as the third source of energy, according to the UK Energy reflection group.
It is almost double on the part in China, the best world supplier of solar panels and a world leader in green technologies, and one of the highest rates in Asia, according to Reuters’ Analysis of bilaire data.
But the explosion of solar absorption has omitted many people in the urban middle class in difficulty in Pakistan, who were forced to reduce electricity in the face of arrow invoices, according to interviews with more than two dozen people, including energy managers, consumers and analysts in the electricity sector.
Most of the country’s solar panels are not connected to sell excess network capacity, so the advantages of cheap and reliable power are not widely shared.
The leak of wealthy Pakistani with solar access from the national network has brought a hard blow for those who rely on expensive conventional sources of power.
Electricity companies that have lost their most lucrative customers have been forced to increase the prices of their pool of narrowing customers to cover operating costs, according to Arzachel, an energy consulting company based in Karachi.
Countries like South Africa are also faced with the expansion of energy differences after wealthy residents have adopted solar energy. But analysts look at Pakistan particularly closely due to the pace to which the nation of 250 million adopted the energy based on the sun.
“This could serve as a remuneration on how regulations and policy must follow technological change and rapidly evolving economy,” said Haneea Isaad, specialist in Energy Finance based in Islamabad at the Institute of Energy Economy and Financial Analysis.
In an interview ReutersThe Minister of Power Awais Leghari recognized the energy gap, but noted that the prices have dropped considerably since June 2024, when the IMF has approved discounts.
He also underlined a strong absorption of solar energy by rural Pakistanis, many of which had previously had limited access to the grid. Many non -urban Pakistanis have installed small solar configurations to meet their power needs, which are generally much lower than those of their counterparts living in the city.
“Pakistan has in fact crossed a solar revolution,” he said. “The grid will become cleaner from day to day, and this is something we have achieved as a nation of which we are proud.”
The IMF did not return the requests for comments.
Energy fracture
A few kilometers from the high -end district of Saleem, Nadia Khan restructured her life to reduce electricity costs.
The air conditioning in the apartment manufacturer’s apartment is rarely used and has stopped ironing most of the clothes worn by her family of five, citing the price of power.
Khan’s family is not the only one to reduce: only 1% of paid consumers used more than 400 electricity units in 2024, according to Karachi renewable consultations, down from 10% before the pandemic.
Like others among the masses of Pakistan residents of apartments without space to install solar modules, Khan was excluded from the revolution.
The roofs of numerous apartments are designated for water storage purposes and other sanitation purposes, while owners of rental buildings are little encouraged to invest in solar connections for their tenants.
“We get sunlight inside, but I can’t think of a way to go to solar,” she said. “Why should people living in apartments suffer?”
Meanwhile, Pakistanis of land ownership benefited from the overabundance of solar modules at a small Chinese manufacturing cost excluded from the West by high prices.
China exported 16.6 solar capacity gigawatts to Pakistan last year, according to EMBER, about five times more than in 2022. The average cost per WATT of exported solar module capacity also dropped by 54% during the same period.
However, most solar configurations are not configured to return spare energy to the network, which limits their advantage to the wider public. Renewable energies expert Syed Faizan Ali Shah, who advises the government on solar adoption, said that less than 10% of solar consumers sell a surplus power to the network.
Government experts and representatives blame high costs and the sanction for delays. The connection of a solar module at the grid generally takes between three and nine months, said an Ahtasam Ahmad renewable energy expert, which has encouraged a lot not to disturb.
The power conversion generated from a solar panel for network transmission also requires equipment such as inverters, which generally cost between $ 1,400 and $ 1,800, or about half of the median income of households in Pakistan.
Swear costs
The conglomerate of Pakistan Interloop has installed hundreds of solar modules next to its cows in the province of Punjab which help to provide electricity by keeping its 9 300 fresh cattle and their cooled milk.
Investment in solar energy has been lucrative for interloop, which generally breaks even on solar installation costs after three to four years. Basic operating costs are approximately three -quarters less than network payments, said Energy Director of Interloop Faizan Ul Haq.
The money that Interloop saves also reflects a gaping hole in the accounts of Pakistan electricity companies.
Even if the industrial and richer Pakistani groups are now consuming less electricity, suppliers’ costs have not changed proportionally. Fixed expenses such as fuel contracts and upgrading of the transmission architecture represented around 70% of suppliers’ expenses during the year until June 2024, according to an estimate of Arzachel.
To cover the costs, suppliers have increased prices on their remaining customers, who have already faced repeated increases following the IMF agreement.
The fixed costs of RS200 billion were transferred to non-solar consumers during the financial year 2023-2024, which means that they paid 6.3% more per kilowatt-hour than they would have otherwise, according to Arzachel.
Imports of solar panels have increased since then, which means that the request for a grid should continue to decrease, forcing the remaining customers to pay more.
“Pakistan’s experience demonstrates a crucial lesson: when governments do not adapt quickly enough, people take care of,” Ahmad said renewable energies.