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.
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 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.
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
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?
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.
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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!!!
>
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.
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.
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.