Pakistan's Rooftop Solar Boom Hits a Policy Wall

Pakistan's rooftop solar boom has been one of the more remarkable consumer-driven energy shifts anywhere in the world in recent years — but 2026 data suggests the easiest phase of that boom may be behind it.

How big the boom got

Net-metered rooftop solar capacity rose from under 1 GW in 2023 to roughly 4.9 GW by March 2025 — growth so fast that installations became visible from satellite imagery. By the summer of 2025, solar had become Pakistan's single largest source of electricity during peak months, generating around a quarter of total power at times. At the national level, Pakistan imported 7.6 GW of solar panels in 2023, then 16.4 GW in 2024, then 16.9 GW in 2025 — making it the second-largest solar panel importer in the world that year.

What actually drove it

This wasn't a government-led clean-energy program. The driving force was consumer desperation: recurring circular debt in the power sector (which we cover in detail in our circular debt explainer), repeated tariff hikes, and unreliable grid supply pushed households, businesses, and factories to generate their own electricity rather than depend on the national grid. That shift became economically viable because Chinese solar panel prices fell roughly fivefold between 2022 and 2024, putting rooftop systems within reach of a much wider range of households than would have been possible a few years earlier.

The policy change that's slowing things down

In February 2026, Pakistan's National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) issued new Prosumer Regulations that ended the older unit-for-unit net metering model — the mechanism that had let solar households offset their grid consumption directly, unit for unit, with the power they generated and fed back into the grid. That change fundamentally altered the payback math for a new rooftop installation.

The import numbers already show the slowdown

Between January and May 2026, Pakistan imported just 4,574 MW of solar panels, compared to 11,781 MW in the same five-month window in 2025 — a drop of roughly 61%. That's a significant deceleration from a boom that had been doubling capacity year over year just two years earlier, and it lines up with the timing of the NEPRA regulatory shift.

What this means going forward

None of this reverses the solar capacity Pakistan has already installed — that generation continues to reduce pressure on the grid and on household bills for the households that already have systems. But the sharp drop in new imports suggests that without a policy environment that preserves reasonable economics for new installations, the boom's next phase will look very different from the rapid consumer-led expansion of 2023 through 2025.

Build Better Pakistan's Energy Desk tracks Pakistan's power-sector transition as part of our ongoing energy coverage.