Energy

Every Pakistani knows load shedding. The fan stops. The UPS clicks on. The street goes dark in a planned way at the planned hour. What most people do not know is that load shedding is not really an electricity story. It is a money story, a fuel story, and increasingly a climate story, all wrapped together. To understand it, you have to follow the rupee from your bijli ka bill all the way back to a coal mine in Tharparkar.

Pakistan generates electricity from a mix. Roughly a third comes from natural gas and LNG, a third from hydropower like Tarbela and Mangla, around a fifth from coal, and the rest from oil, nuclear, wind, and solar in smaller shares. The mix shifts year by year. The headline problem is that imported fuel, LNG and furnace oil, is paid for in dollars. When the rupee weakens, the cost of generation rises, but the tariff cannot rise as fast, so the gap is borne by the system as debt.

Now bring climate into the picture. Coal is the cheapest fuel per unit of energy in the short run, which is why Pakistan built large new plants on Thar coal. Coal is also the dirtiest fuel per unit of energy. Burning a kilogram of Thar coal releases roughly two kilograms of carbon dioxide. The Thar block plants run twenty four hours a day. Multiply this by years. Pakistan as a whole emits less than one percent of global emissions, but the country is in the top ten most climate vulnerable countries because the air does not care who emitted what. Heatwaves in Jacobabad, glacier melt in Hunza, and floods in Dadu fall on us regardless.

Solar has changed the math fast. Imported Chinese solar panels became dramatically cheaper between 2020 and 2024. By 2024 a 5 kilowatt rooftop system in Lahore cost roughly PKR 700,000 to 900,000 installed and paid for itself in three to four years against a tariff that kept climbing. Net metering allowed homes to push surplus daytime power back to the grid. Pakistan installed more rooftop solar in 2024 than in the previous decade combined. This is the biggest energy story in the country and it is happening on private roofs, not in government press conferences.

What can a household actually do this month. Audit the load. Find the three biggest consumers. Almost always they are the AC, the geyser, and the iron. Set the AC at 26 degrees not 18, and a study by Lahore University of Management Sciences in 2023 found this single change cuts household electricity by 15 to 20 percent in summer. Replace incandescent bulbs that are still left with LEDs. Use the geyser only when needed and turn it off after bathing, not all day. Iron all clothes for the week in one sitting so the iron only heats once.

Today's exercise. Pull out one electricity bill from this summer and one from last winter. Note the units, the cost per unit at each slab, the fuel adjustment line, and the taxes. Calculate what fraction of your bill is fuel cost passed through. Then ask one neighbour with rooftop solar what their bill looks like in the same months. The numbers will not lie. They will tell you whether the energy transition is something distant or something already on your street.