Five years ago, Pakistan’s power sector was essentially a hostage situation. The country was generating 143 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, which sounds reasonable enough until you look at where it was coming from — and how exposed that left ordinary Pakistanis to forces entirely beyond their control.
Nearly 35 terawatt-hours came from RLNG, regasified liquefied natural gas imported at prices tied to global oil markets. Another 12 came from residual furnace oil. Together, those two fuels alone accounted for almost a third of everything the country generated. When a tanker ran aground in the Suez Canal, Islamabad felt it on its electricity bills. When the rupee slid, tariffs climbed. When Middle Eastern politics grew complicated, Pakistan’s lights flickered with them. This was not an energy system so much as a permanent vulnerability dressed up in transmission lines.
What made it genuinely painful was the contractual dimension. Pakistan had locked itself into two long-term LNG agreements with Qatar, totalling 6.75 million tonnes per year and carrying cumulative obligations of between $26 billion and $40 billion. Take-or-pay clauses meant the government owed money on those volumes regardless of whether anyone actually needed the electricity. So, RLNG plants ran whether or not the grid needed them, crowding out domestic gas producers who couldn’t compete for pipeline access and keeping coal plants sitting idle at barely 14 to 20 per cent utilisation. Analysts eventually calculated that forcing RLNG dispatch over cheaper available coal was costing the country around Rs 9,400 billion annually — a staggering hidden toll passed straight through to consumers via tariffs. Essentially, every household and factory in Pakistan was quietly paying a surcharge to honour contracts that served importers far more than they served the country.
Something had to give. And it did, though not in the way anyone quite planned.
If you look closely at how we’ve been trying to solve our chronic power issues, the most intentional, game-changing move we’ve made was to bank on nuclear energy. The moment the massive K-2 reactor came online in May 2021, the relief on the national grid was palpable; practically overnight, our nuclear output doubled, jumping from about 10.9 to over 22 terawatt-hours, giving our struggling system the steady, predictable, and entirely import-free baseload power it so desperately craved. At the same time, authorities finally rolled up their sleeves and pushed harder on Thar coal, ending years of national frustration at letting such a massive, homegrown resource sit dormant beneath the desert. Let’s be completely honest—there is absolutely nothing glamorous about dusty coal mines or silent nuclear cooling towers, and they certainly don’t make for flashy, click-driven headlines, but shouldn’t we as a nation be asking ourselves if shiny political projects really matter when it is this quiet, gritty pursuit of domestic self-reliance that actually keeps our country’s lights on? But they quietly shifted the structural math of Pakistan’s energy economy in ways that RLNG contracts never could.
Then came the part nobody planned at all.
As DISCO tariffs climbed — partly to recover subsidy arrears, partly to absorb transmission losses that should have been fixed decades ago — consumers started doing their own arithmetic. A factory owner in Faisalabad or a farmer in Sindh didn’t need an energy policy briefing to figure out that rooftop solar was paying for itself in three to four years. Between 2022 and 2024, Pakistan imported somewhere between 24 and 31 gigawatts of solar modules. Four gigawatts went into utility-scale projects. The rest — call it 20 to 27 gigawatts — quietly disappeared onto factory rooftops, agricultural pump stations, and suburban homes across the country. By mid-2025, an estimated 14 to 20 gigawatts of behind-the-meter solar capacity was generating roughly 20 terawatt-hours annually. None of it appears in official NEPRA statistics. None of it passes through a DISCO meter. It exists in a shadow economy of kilowatt-hours that regulators are only beginning to reckon with.
Agriculture tells the story most vividly. Grid sales to the farming sector fell from 10.2 terawatt-hours in FY 2021-22 to an estimated 5.6 terawatt-hours by FY 2024-25. That’s 4.6 terawatt-hours gone in three years — enough to power a mid-sized city — representing 1.8 million farmers who have quietly stopped relying on the state-managed grid for irrigation. They bought solar pumps instead. The economics made it obvious, so they acted. Nobody announced this transition. There was no ribbon-cutting. It just happened, one tubewell at a time.
When you add all of this up — grid generation plus the invisible behind-the-meter economy — the picture is genuinely striking. Total indigenous generation grew from 96 terawatt-hours in FY 2020-21 to 147 terawatt-hours in FY 2024-25. Energy independence climbed from 66 to 85 per cent. RLNG generation fell 49 per cent. RFO fell 50 per cent. The imported fuel trap that defined Pakistan’s energy vulnerability for a generation has been, if not entirely escaped, then fundamentally weakened. The geopolitical exposure that once made every Strait of Hormuz news alert a potential tariff event has shrunk to something far more manageable.
Yet inside this achievement, some awkward realities are taking shape. Pakistan’s net-metering registry now covers 378,000 registered distributed generation consumers. Dig into those numbers and a strange cross-subsidy emerges: 297,000 residential households have become net electricity exporters, feeding surplus solar back into the grid — and inadvertently financing industrial consumers who net-import 1.48 terawatt-hours annually. Small households are effectively subsidising large factories. That might be tolerable as a transitional anomaly. As a permanent feature of the system, it isn’t sustainable, and without time-of-use tariffs and smarter pricing mechanisms, it will only grow more distorted.
There is also the matter of what official statistics are missing. NEPRA counts 127 terawatt-hours of grid generation in FY 2024-25. The real indigenous supply number, once behind-the-meter solar is included, is closer to 147. That 20-terawatt-hour gap isn’t a rounding error — it’s roughly equivalent to Pakistan’s entire nuclear output. Planners making decisions about generation investment, grid expansion, and demand forecasting are working from a map that’s missing a significant chunk of terrain.
None of this diminishes what has genuinely been accomplished. Pakistan entered this decade hostage to imported fuels and contractual obligations it could barely afford. It exists in the first half of the decade, having cut that dependency nearly in half, doubled its nuclear output, and discovered — largely by accident — that its own citizens could build a decentralised solar economy faster than any utility-scale rollout could have managed. That is a real transformation. It just happened more quietly, and more chaotically, than the policy narratives tend to acknowledge.
The energy security problem, in its old form, is largely solved. What remains is the harder, less dramatic work of building a grid architecture worthy of the transition that has already occurred — one that prices electricity honestly, rewards flexibility, and stops pretending that 378,000 distributed generators don’t exist. The revolution happened. Now comes the part where institutions catch up with reality.
