When Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif stood beneath the chandeliers of Riyadh at the 9th Future Investment Initiative Conference 2025, his call for global unity against climate change carried both moral gravity and bitter irony. He reminded the world that Pakistan, drowning in floods, debt, and despair, had lost over 130 billion dollars in climate-induced damages since 2022. Yet, while appealing for global justice, his own government prepared to cripple Pakistan’s most promising climate policy: rooftop solar net metering.
Pakistan’s climate struggle is undeniable. The floods of 2022, and again in 2025, displaced millions. But instead of accelerating renewables, Islamabad remains chained to fossil fuels. Three decades of short-sighted policies have turned an energy opportunity into an environmental tragedy.
The decline began in 1994. That year, Independent Power Producers (IPPs) were introduced as a shortcut to progress. What was sold as modernisation became dependency. Then, in 2015, two federal ministers celebrated imported coal and LNG plants as “game changers”. They were transformative only in destruction, for each plant deepened circular debt and darkened the skies.
In the 1970s and 1980s, hydropower generated over 70 per cent of Pakistan’s electricity; the air was clean, and the carbon footprint light. But by the mid-1990s, Pakistan had abandoned hydropower for fossil fuels. When the ministers of 2015 expanded the coal and LNG empire, they did not merely sign contracts; they surrendered national sovereignty to imported fuel and perpetual debt.
Now, the government plans its most reckless reversal yet: cutting the rooftop solar buyback rate from Rs 22 to Rs 11.30 per unit. Officials claim that solar households “burden the grid” by reducing electricity sales. Instead of rewarding citizens for generating clean power, the Ministry of Power punishes them. Bureaucrats claim that solar users “use the grid as a battery”, yet they ignore the reality that rooftop systems ease the load on a decaying grid that already loses nearly 20 per cent of transmitted electricity to theft and inefficiency. Curtailing distributed generation protects only one thing: the bureaucracy’s monopoly on failure.
According to NEPRA’s State of Industry Report 2024, electricity from China-Pakistan Economic Corridor-era coal plants is among the most expensive in the world
Technically, their argument collapses under evidence. The International Energy Agency reports that one megawatt-hour of coal-fired electricity emits between 970 and 1,050 kilograms of carbon dioxide, while natural gas emits between 450 and 500 kilograms. In contrast, hydropower, wind, and solar release only 4 to 48 grams per kilowatt-hour, a thousand times cleaner. Yet Pakistan continues to choose the dirtiest options.
According to NEPRA’s State of Industry Report 2024, electricity from China-Pakistan Economic Corridor-era coal plants is among the most expensive in the world. Sahiwal costs Rs 81 per unit; Port Qasim costs Rs 149; the China Power Hub costs Rs 311 per unit, including capacity payments. Each figure is a monument to irrationality. The so-called “Corridor of Light” has become a corridor of debt, where every imported megawatt arrives chained to a foreign bill.
Between 1990 and 2024, Pakistan’s power-sector emissions increased fivefold. Carbon dioxide has surged, and methane and nitrous oxide continue to rise. The skies over the Indus Basin grow darker each year, filled with smog, heat, and dying crops. Every tonne of carbon dioxide spewed by fossil plants is not an abstraction; it is a farmer’s ruined harvest, a child’s damaged lungs, a home washed away by floods.
Officials now warn that unchecked rooftop growth could displace 18.8 billion units of grid power by the financial year 2034, causing 545 billion rupees in “lost revenue”. Yet no one counts the trillions lost to imported fuel, the billions wasted in idle capacity payments, or the tens of billions in flood damages each year caused by the same fossil-fuelled climate change.
The policy debate misses the truth. Rooftop solar is not a luxury; reducing dependence on fossil fuels is not optional, it is a necessity. Undermining net metering now extinguishes the only real progress made towards energy security.
Energy security means reliable, affordable, uninterrupted power from domestic sources, not dependence on imported coal and LNG
Clipping solar-based net metering means more circular debt. It means more greenhouse gases, more smog, and more choking cities. It shows that the government has still failed to recognise the direct connection between clean energy and climate change. It also reveals that policymakers remain alien to the very meaning of energy security. Yet the same government travels the world pleading for climate funds while dismantling its own climate solutions.
Energy security means reliable, affordable, uninterrupted power from domestic sources, not dependence on imported coal and LNG. Yet we are dismantling this foundation to produce the world’s most expensive electricity. This is not governance; it is surrender. The Power Division would do well to remember the United States Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which mandated reliance on indigenous and renewable sources. That vision has guided every advanced nation, including India. But Pakistan drifts further into darkness, trading sunlight for smoke.
The results are visible: smog-choked skies over Lahore and Karachi; crippling electricity bills; an economy suffocated by 20 billion dollars in annual fuel imports. Pakistan’s grid, once a symbol of progress, now powers 250 million people on borrowed energy and borrowed time. The sky darkens, the air thickens, and policymakers still worship the smokestack while sunlight blazes untapped above their heads.
Cutting net metering will also devastate the emerging solar revolt by ordinary citizens who are unfamiliar with climate change, yet have created a success story. For a country pleading for international climate finance, this reversal borders on hypocrisy. The same government that demands “loss and damage” funds at global forums is now discouraging citizens from producing clean power at home. This is not merely poor economics; it is a governance failure.
The world must not stay silent. If the Global North truly believes in climate justice, it must stand with Pakistan’s solar citizens, the few who have chosen sunlight over smoke. Every rooftop panel taken down means another tonne of coal burned, another village flooded, another child condemned to breathe poison.
Pakistan’s energy story is no longer one of ignorance; it is one of betrayal. From policymakers who sold rivers to profiteers who bought skies, every act of greed has dimmed the nation’s light. Yet across Pakistan, a quiet defiance endures. Every photovoltaic cell reflects resilience. Every kilowatt of sunlight is a vote for survival.
The question is no longer about policy; it is about survival. Will Pakistan protect that light or bury it beneath imported coal? Because when the final rooftop dims, it will not mark the end of a policy. It will mark the death of hope, the death of the nation’s chance to stand, breathe, and live under its own light.