Pakistan Clears 11,695 Solar Backlogs, But Net Billing Threatens to Reverse the Gains

The federal government has cleared 11,695 pending net-metering applications across Pakistan^[1], a tangible win for deployment speed and consumer rights. The backlog had accumulated during the regulatory transition from net metering to net billing; direct contact with applicants has begun, and the Power Division is explicitly protecting consumers from predatory agents demanding payment for faster processing^[3]. This is the operational side of solar rights working: clear the docket, communicate directly, remove friction.

But here is the mechanism that matters: Pakistan's National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (NEPRA) is simultaneously rewriting the compensation structure through the Prosumer Regulations 2025. The proposed export tariff would be cut by half, from PKR 26 ($0.093 USD) per kWh to PKR 13 (about $0.05 USD) per kWh^[5]. That is not a technical adjustment. That is demand destruction by design, and it is the same playbook that destroyed residential solar deployment in California after the state adopted its Net Billing Tariff in 2023, cutting export rates by roughly 75% and followed by a collapse in new installations through 2023 and 2024.

The Pakistan case names the mechanism plainly: under net billing, surplus power will be credited at the utility's "nationally determined average energy purchase price," not the retail rate the customer pays to buy power^[5]. The asymmetry is structural. A consumer pays full retail for grid imports; the utility buys exports at wholesale. The export credit shrinks the payback period and the self-consumption incentive, and the smaller the credit, the larger the attached battery storage required to make the system worthwhile. In California, battery attach rates jumped from a minority of residential installations to the majority after NEM 3.0 took effect, because without batteries, the economics collapsed.

The political question is whether Pakistan's Minister Leghari intends the backlog clearance and the rate cut to happen in sequence or in concert. If the 11,695 cleared applicants are grandfathered under the old net-metering rates, the policy coherence holds: you clear the cases, you honor the terms those customers applied under, and you apply new rules to new applicants going forward. If the rate cut applies retroactively or the grandfather period is short, the clearance becomes a decoy. You open the valve to let applications flow, then cut the export rate so sharply that the system pays back in 15 years instead of 8, and installations collapse anyway. The docket and the dates matter. Which customers are grandfathered, for how long, and under which tariff?

Pakistan's underlying value-of-solar stack includes avoided energy cost, avoided generation capacity, deferred distribution infrastructure, reduced line losses, avoided fuel-price hedging risk, and avoided import bills for fossil gas burned for power generation, a stack that is genuinely high in a country where grid electricity remains expensive and imports remain a fiscal burden. A wholesale-price export credit erases most of that value from the customer's perspective and concentrates it in the utility's revenue requirement, which then must be recovered through higher fixed charges or volumetric rates on the remaining customer base. The regressive effect is real: non-solar customers, often poorer and less able to self-finance, subsidize the cash recovery of the utility while wealthy rooftop-solar owners are pushed toward battery-backed self-consumption, further shrinking the grid's revenue base.

The honest rate-design fix is a time-and-location-granular export price that reflects the actual value a system provides in its hour and location, rather than a blunt wholesale price that undervalues peak-hour afternoon exports when demand is high and the grid's avoidance of peaking capacity would be greatest. If NEPRA is concerned about cost recovery, the answer is to price exports fairly by the hour and location, not to slash the rate uniformly. If NEPRA is concerned about grid stability, the answer is to require storage or to set grid-support requirements in the interconnection standard, not to hollow out the economic case for the systems themselves.