Solar is not less than revolution in Pakistan. Almost every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs. More affluent houses have almost gone off grid; others are selling back to grid and others who can't afford has their own small scale 12V solar panels to run fans in the scorching summer of Pakistan to save electricity bills. It is all done by people independently without much support from the government as ROI (if you are using full potential of your installed capacity, it can be as low as 1 year and afterwords it will be free) is much better on solar than paying the grid.
I myself has got one my roof, 6KW with 5Kwh battery backup costing me 700K roughly 2500$. Now, I can use AC without thinking of electricity bills and the most importantly I do not have to face inconvenience of grid being not available in some cases for 24 hours.
Now Pakistan is facing energy crises not because it does not have enough, because it has too much as people are generating their own and due to nature of the contracts with electricity producing companies' government has to pay them according to their installed capacity not by generated.
According to a government report in 2021, 116,816Gwh was consumed commercially and in 2024 it stands at 111,110Gwh and in 25 and 26 in would be even lower.
> The Chief Financial Officer of Pakistan’s Fauji Cement Co. installed its first solar array in 2019 at Jhang Bhatar, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of the capital Islamabad. There are now 69 megawatts of panels across the company’s five main sites, at least twice what Tesla Inc. appears to have on the rooftops of its gigafactories in Nevada and Texas.1 They contribute about 23% of the company’s electricity, with a further 35% coming from recovering waste heat from its coal-fired clinker kilns.
Especially for hot and sunny areas solar is insane.
At mid day, max heat, you get the peak production and can run your AC at full throttle.
That enables you to efficiently work at nice temperatures.
It is genuninely insane (in a good way!) I've encountered some degree of apprehension and disbelief from people in Western countries when I told them, that countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables, and even for the everyman, installing solar and having (a usually Chinese) EV just makes sense - economically, and not only in terms of saving the planet.
The markup on solar in Europe is insane, and it usually comes down to shitty government regulations - we were forced to upgrade to a 3 phase system (even though our net drain from the grid was looking to decrease), install a government monitoring and control system (and were locked out of some inverter settings), and install a lot of questionable 'safety' equipment (like a DC fire safety cutout, which some argue is even a bigger fire hazard than not having it), and basically all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.
Not to mention, all the red tape.
But in exchange we get to feed back to the power grid for like 5% of the original price. To be fair, we got a substantial subsidy and in the end, jumping through these hoops was only a bit more expensive that going at it by myself and installing the hardware we actually needed and paying for it out of pocket.
> countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables
This isn’t surprising; cell phones and mobile payments also took over much faster in Africa than Europe/US because the existing infrastructure (landlines, banks) was highly underdeveloped or unreliable.
> all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.
Isn't that exactly backwards of what you'd naively expect? Peak regulatory dysfunction.
Are these mandated systems capable of operating in the event of a grid outage? I understand that a lot of US installs cheap out on the necessary component.
It's just tying them into your houses wiring, and therefore the grid, that's expensive. That, and putting them on your roof (Because anything roofing is really expensive, which makes sense since roofing is in the top 5 most dangerous jobs in the US, and it sucks to do, and it doesn't even pay that well even still!)
It is absolutely sane and perfectly reasonable. The climate highly support it, you are already used to a grid that in some cases are not available 24/7, and the major energy consumptions are AC and fans which correlate with production.
I'm not from Pakistan but Karachi is the only vertical city in Pakistan, most people lives in apartment buildings, I would suggest looking at other cities like Lahore.
Sorry, I fixed it to "Almost every". I agree, "Every" is overstated.
I have never been to Karachi, what I know about Karachi, Karachi weather is not as harsh as Punjab or away from coastline so, you might survive (If you are used to living without AC) there without AC. And further, its hugely densely populate area so a lot of people might not have roof to install it. And Karachi gets people from the whole country and most of the people are living there temporarily, they might not want to commit on installing solar system on a rented house.
I really appreciate the Technology Connections take on renewable energy from solar and batteries including a recyclable component. With fossil fuels, the power plant has to be built, and then the fuel is constantly shipped in, which requires constant extraction. While solar panels and batteries can not only consume their fuel for effectively free, but at the end of their life, the materials in them can be recycled without needing massive mines for fresh glass, aluminum, lithium, silicon, etc.
In a race metaphor I'd say it is a car that has a higher top speed, is already travelling faster than competitors but is still accelerating. However it is still laps behind some competitors that had a head start.
Is that "winning"? I'd say no, but is it going to win? Yes, obviously.
I'd love for solar on my house. Unfortunately I live in a wooded valley in the northeast, first, and second, it's extremely expensive in the United States. That means that you can only take advantage of it outside of winter months (since the house will only get a few hours of direct sunlight), and that you need to pay a lot of money to get the panels and the electricals updated for that minimal benefit.
I would have loved it, but I think there's a reason why places like Pakistan has them on every roof, and in the US we're not going in that direction.
The problem solar will create is that solar doesn't work for highrises. It works for suburbs. Electricity companies will be forced (more and more) to tax suburbs for nothing (for the sun, Louis XVI-style) to keep reasonable energy prices in cities.
Unless of course, cities think ahead for once and city hall gets large solar collectors (at least the physical area) along power lines NOW.
This seems quite strange to claim.
Basically every city in the developed world already has power plants on the outside and a lot of wires to get the electricity in
I try to be optimistic but don't extrapolate prematurely. The problem is not solar but storage and is not solved yet. I suppose the time will come that we will have to sacrifice part of the cheap solar energy to produce efuels or similar for our winters, transportation etc
almost nobody seems to get this. even if you replace conventional generators with solar, you still have to keep them around (and pay to keep them there) for when the sun is not shining, since there's currently no way to buffer the solar power.
Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly so they can get charged just by moving around? Or why can't we have SVs(Solar Vehicles)? Why do we have to use solar panels on EV stations rather than just having them on the vehicles themselves?
> The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.
> A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
We must think metric, every inch of the way!
Anyway, PVCs currently max out at about 300W / square metre - and that's in ideal conditions.
I believe theoretical maximum energy per square metre (when light actually arrives at the planet surface) is conveniently pretty close to 1000W, assuming you're in the right place, but maximum efficiency of contemporary panels is only about 30%.
Pure solar is indeed to much of a constraint, it make it more challenging than propelling humans over roads in an enclosure needs to be.
A big problem is sharing the road with conventional vehicles. Many could probably drive straight though it, a Tesla could probably drive straight though it.
If the car must be a strong metal container the choices quickly reduce to the things on the market right now.
I was just trying to use “familiar” units. I could have led with 1 HP per square yard, and then you’d totally have license to call me out!
And yeah, I was just talking about solar flux, there’s a whole lot of real world losses to consider but my point was that none of this matters, it’s orders of magnitude away from ICE engine output.
It was the fact you started using units the world knows - albeit misspelling metre - but in the next sentence, comparing that same dimension, you used an apostrophe to allude to a unit that only 5% of the planet uses.
I think it is quite interesting, because it also tries to be maximal efficient, which increases the "reach" that the panels provide.
Don't get me wrong, this is a enthusiast car, but I think the economics could actually work for a small city car.
Currently here in Europe, buying a electric car makes sense for home owners, which can charge their vehicle for cheap at home (especially if you PV). But a lot of people living in cities don't have a cheap charging spot. A car with solar panels, which gains a few percents of charge each day (instead of losing some), e.g. enough for the daily commute to work, may be interesting for such people.
I would love to see a ultra cheap take on this. Maybe an electric tuktuk like someone else suggested, with some solar panels slapped on it.
For example, if you had an electric golf cart with a solar roof, on a sunny day…
With two adults, a speed of 35 MPH, an LLM suggested a ratio of 10:1—that is, the power demands of the golf cart were 10x what the solar could deliver in real time. (LLM considered also aerodynamic drag, rolling resistance of golf cart tires…). When I suggest a speed of 25 MPH, the ratio came down to 5:1.
Regardless, assuming batteries to store energy on the cart, it suggests a 10 minute drive to your neighborhood grocery store would require the golf cart to sit in the parking lot for close to an hour before it will have caught the batteries back up to their charge before you left home. (And this is at the rather impatient 25 MPH drive.)
To get to a better ratio you would have to engineer like hell to start squeezing the numerator. Make it radically aerodynamic, low-rolling resistance tires (probably the lowest hanging fruit), cut the weight significantly…
I do love the idea of something like an electric rickshaw or tuk-tuk. Maybe not streamlined, but you could get much better rolling resistance with something like bicycle tires—and weight could be kept in check.
You absolutely can .. but in order to be self sustaining vehicles need to look somewhat like the builds that appear in Australian multi day solar races - ultra lightweight, extreme streamlining, zero driver comfort, no extras like cargo space and automatic rear doors, etc.
> With 100% efficiency the area of the car is too small to produce enough electricity to drive.
is false - Australia has been racing solar powered cars for a good many years now, clearly they generate sufficient power to drive, just not especially fast, with any reserve energy, or at night, with any real comfort, etc.
The amount of power that can be generated from the surface area of a car is pretty small compared to how much a car consumes. And the cost hasn't been low enough compared to the value of the electricity it could produce.
Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.
you get too little energy vs the cost of integrating it. It gets worse considering as a driver you want to park your car in shade/garage/multistory parkings
My understanding is that when buying a car you are dealing with an oligopoly. You might think that you have a lot of options, but they all come from the same source. Furthermore, big money control not only car production, but oil too. If they allow the ceo of a car company to come with such a car, they loose billions in the oil industry. So they have no incentive to do that.
New options do appear on the market like the new toyota prius with solar panel, but if you look at it you will see that they didn't even try to maximize the solar panel size. Still it gets 2 km extra range in bad conditions. Triple that and you have 6 km, in real conditions. If you use your car every other day, you will never charge it, ever. If you get average or above sun, you can drive it daily and not charge it ever. A big problem if you sell oil.
The problem with green energy is that it is very democratic and hard to control. Nobody with big money is interested in that.
To understand who controls your life, see all the draconian measures taken against electric scooters: cheap, not poluting, democratic, don't need a lot of space and so on. Everyone with money said: we can't allow that. Write defamatory articles in the media they control, pass laws against it and so on.
There was a production car planned called the Lightyear One [0], originating from a Dutch student team, but if I recall correctly it was quite difficult and expensive to manufacture.
A much better idea is to 20x the surface area of solar panels, get ones that aren't as weight sensitive (and therefor expensive), mount them on your house or garage roof instead, and charge the EV off that when it's parked adjacent. Maybe add a battery as buffer for when the car's not there.
And it in fact has been an option on some cars, but not a popular one. It has been described as "worthless"
He came up with a design where the panels can can unfolded for a larger surface area. But you can only do that when the car is at rest. And it's permanently like having a loaded roof-rack. Its's still less practical than mounting solar panels on the roof of a house or other fixed structure.
One question I have with solar is: what is the reasonable maximum it can produce as a proportion of each country's needs? Solar is the most guaranteed to be intermittent electricity source around, and can have high seasonality, too.
I am confused. The article claims that solar is the best, cheapest source of power. It also claims that the Trump administration is undermining it in the US by cutting federal subsidies.
If solar truly is the cheapest, why does it need any help from any government? It would seem to me that it should flourish in any capitalist society where money naturally flows towards the cheapest solution that actually works.
141 comments
I myself has got one my roof, 6KW with 5Kwh battery backup costing me 700K roughly 2500$. Now, I can use AC without thinking of electricity bills and the most importantly I do not have to face inconvenience of grid being not available in some cases for 24 hours.
Now Pakistan is facing energy crises not because it does not have enough, because it has too much as people are generating their own and due to nature of the contracts with electricity producing companies' government has to pay them according to their installed capacity not by generated.
According to a government report in 2021, 116,816Gwh was consumed commercially and in 2024 it stands at 111,110Gwh and in 25 and 26 in would be even lower.
Isn't it insane?
Asia’s Industrial Revolution Is Switching Off Gas
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-22/asia-s...
> The Chief Financial Officer of Pakistan’s Fauji Cement Co. installed its first solar array in 2019 at Jhang Bhatar, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of the capital Islamabad. There are now 69 megawatts of panels across the company’s five main sites, at least twice what Tesla Inc. appears to have on the rooftops of its gigafactories in Nevada and Texas.1 They contribute about 23% of the company’s electricity, with a further 35% coming from recovering waste heat from its coal-fired clinker kilns.
The markup on solar in Europe is insane, and it usually comes down to shitty government regulations - we were forced to upgrade to a 3 phase system (even though our net drain from the grid was looking to decrease), install a government monitoring and control system (and were locked out of some inverter settings), and install a lot of questionable 'safety' equipment (like a DC fire safety cutout, which some argue is even a bigger fire hazard than not having it), and basically all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.
Not to mention, all the red tape.
But in exchange we get to feed back to the power grid for like 5% of the original price. To be fair, we got a substantial subsidy and in the end, jumping through these hoops was only a bit more expensive that going at it by myself and installing the hardware we actually needed and paying for it out of pocket.
sOcIaLiSM!!!
> countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables
This isn’t surprising; cell phones and mobile payments also took over much faster in Africa than Europe/US because the existing infrastructure (landlines, banks) was highly underdeveloped or unreliable.
> all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.
Isn't that exactly backwards of what you'd naively expect? Peak regulatory dysfunction.
Are these mandated systems capable of operating in the event of a grid outage? I understand that a lot of US installs cheap out on the necessary component.
Solar energy per capita / income per capita. What results do you get?
The fact that income is so high in America but solar panels are not ubiquitous everywhere.
It's just tying them into your houses wiring, and therefore the grid, that's expensive. That, and putting them on your roof (Because anything roofing is really expensive, which makes sense since roofing is in the top 5 most dangerous jobs in the US, and it sucks to do, and it doesn't even pay that well even still!)
>
Every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs.Looking at Karachi's 2025 satellite imagery in Google Earth, I find this utterly overstated. Maybe 5% of houses have them on their rooves at best.
And that is in the largest city in Pakistan, where people ostensibly have much more money to throw at solar panels than in rural areas.
I have never been to Karachi, what I know about Karachi, Karachi weather is not as harsh as Punjab or away from coastline so, you might survive (If you are used to living without AC) there without AC. And further, its hugely densely populate area so a lot of people might not have roof to install it. And Karachi gets people from the whole country and most of the people are living there temporarily, they might not want to commit on installing solar system on a rented house.
That might be reason, but numbers speak themselves. Source: [https://www.ceicdata.com/en/pakistan/electricity-generation-...]
Is that "winning"? I'd say no, but is it going to win? Yes, obviously.
I would have loved it, but I think there's a reason why places like Pakistan has them on every roof, and in the US we're not going in that direction.
Unless of course, cities think ahead for once and city hall gets large solar collectors (at least the physical area) along power lines NOW.
Battery backed wind and solar farms work for high rises and for the suburbs (see, for example: South Australia).
The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.
A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
Best case if the sun is right over the car you can illuminate about 5 square meters. That’s about 3.75KW.
To convert that to a more familiar car power measurement that’s about 5 horsepower.
Hopefully it’s clear why a realtime solar car is hard.
This is not to say it’s impossible, they have been built. They’re just not super practical for everyday use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_car
> The solar energy you can collect is about 750W/sq meter.
> A car roof is about 5’x5’, and if we are generous and include a trunk and hood area, maybe you are getting 60 sqft?
We must think metric, every inch of the way!
Anyway, PVCs currently max out at about 300W / square metre - and that's in ideal conditions.
I believe theoretical maximum energy per square metre (when light actually arrives at the planet surface) is conveniently pretty close to 1000W, assuming you're in the right place, but maximum efficiency of contemporary panels is only about 30%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNSW_Sunswift#/media/File:Suns...
They are now working on the sunswift 8 which is to be a combination of solar battery and hydrogen.
They are not calling it a solar car anymore apparently.
https://www.unsw.edu.au/challeng/vertically-integrated-proje...
Pure solar is indeed to much of a constraint, it make it more challenging than propelling humans over roads in an enclosure needs to be.
A big problem is sharing the road with conventional vehicles. Many could probably drive straight though it, a Tesla could probably drive straight though it.
If the car must be a strong metal container the choices quickly reduce to the things on the market right now.
I was just trying to use “familiar” units. I could have led with 1 HP per square yard, and then you’d totally have license to call me out!
And yeah, I was just talking about solar flux, there’s a whole lot of real world losses to consider but my point was that none of this matters, it’s orders of magnitude away from ICE engine output.
https://aptera.us/first-vehicle-off-validation-line/
I think it is quite interesting, because it also tries to be maximal efficient, which increases the "reach" that the panels provide.
Don't get me wrong, this is a enthusiast car, but I think the economics could actually work for a small city car. Currently here in Europe, buying a electric car makes sense for home owners, which can charge their vehicle for cheap at home (especially if you PV). But a lot of people living in cities don't have a cheap charging spot. A car with solar panels, which gains a few percents of charge each day (instead of losing some), e.g. enough for the daily commute to work, may be interesting for such people.
I would love to see a ultra cheap take on this. Maybe an electric tuktuk like someone else suggested, with some solar panels slapped on it.
For example, if you had an electric golf cart with a solar roof, on a sunny day…
With two adults, a speed of 35 MPH, an LLM suggested a ratio of 10:1—that is, the power demands of the golf cart were 10x what the solar could deliver in real time. (LLM considered also aerodynamic drag, rolling resistance of golf cart tires…). When I suggest a speed of 25 MPH, the ratio came down to 5:1.
Regardless, assuming batteries to store energy on the cart, it suggests a 10 minute drive to your neighborhood grocery store would require the golf cart to sit in the parking lot for close to an hour before it will have caught the batteries back up to their charge before you left home. (And this is at the rather impatient 25 MPH drive.)
To get to a better ratio you would have to engineer like hell to start squeezing the numerator. Make it radically aerodynamic, low-rolling resistance tires (probably the lowest hanging fruit), cut the weight significantly…
I do love the idea of something like an electric rickshaw or tuk-tuk. Maybe not streamlined, but you could get much better rolling resistance with something like bicycle tires—and weight could be kept in check.
Maybe in time efficiencies will get there.
* https://worldsolarchallenge.org/
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4K0FD9Hh6XY
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_lVdrHnbYo
Addendum: addressing the [dead] comment below
> With 100% efficiency the area of the car is too small to produce enough electricity to drive.
is false - Australia has been racing solar powered cars for a good many years now, clearly they generate sufficient power to drive, just not especially fast, with any reserve energy, or at night, with any real comfort, etc.
> After baking in the sun all day, the car can add 3-4 miles to its range.
Maybe someday the price will get so low it will be a no-brainer.
There also was a project car from the Nordics I think. Can't recall the name though.
Main problem is the large amount of energy a car needs vs what kind of surface area you have and efficiency we get.
An ideal (100% effiwncy) solar cell of 5m² would still need 20 hours to charge a 100kWh battery. And we are way off on area an efficiency in reality.
New options do appear on the market like the new toyota prius with solar panel, but if you look at it you will see that they didn't even try to maximize the solar panel size. Still it gets 2 km extra range in bad conditions. Triple that and you have 6 km, in real conditions. If you use your car every other day, you will never charge it, ever. If you get average or above sun, you can drive it daily and not charge it ever. A big problem if you sell oil.
The problem with green energy is that it is very democratic and hard to control. Nobody with big money is interested in that.
To understand who controls your life, see all the draconian measures taken against electric scooters: cheap, not poluting, democratic, don't need a lot of space and so on. Everyone with money said: we can't allow that. Write defamatory articles in the media they control, pass laws against it and so on.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightyear_0
> Might be a noob question, but why can't EVs have solar panels on them directly
This is 100% a very common noob question. The answers are therefor easy to find if you try.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billroberson/2022/11/30/why-doe...
https://octopusev.com/ev-hub/why-dont-electric-cars-have-sol...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L1_zvqg73Q&t=590s
A much better idea is to 20x the surface area of solar panels, get ones that aren't as weight sensitive (and therefor expensive), mount them on your house or garage roof instead, and charge the EV off that when it's parked adjacent. Maybe add a battery as buffer for when the car's not there.
And it in fact has been an option on some cars, but not a popular one. It has been described as "worthless"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hyundai/comments/tayavo/what_happen...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46456963
Have a look at this, which is a (semi) serious hacker attempt to make it a bit more practical.
https://www.dartsolar.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/194ajsm/my_tes...
He came up with a design where the panels can can unfolded for a larger surface area. But you can only do that when the car is at rest. And it's permanently like having a loaded roof-rack. Its's still less practical than mounting solar panels on the roof of a house or other fixed structure.
One question I have with solar is: what is the reasonable maximum it can produce as a proportion of each country's needs? Solar is the most guaranteed to be intermittent electricity source around, and can have high seasonality, too.
If solar truly is the cheapest, why does it need any help from any government? It would seem to me that it should flourish in any capitalist society where money naturally flows towards the cheapest solution that actually works.