When distributed solar meets a centralised power system
Pakistan's solar debate often gets reduced to immediate questions: what rate will exported units get? Will net billing hurt payback? And, are solar users shifting costs onto others? These questions matter. But once distributed solar reaches meaningful scale, the deeper issue is no longer just pricing. It is integration. Pakistan's first solar phase was driven by consumer economics. Grid electricity became expensive, service quality uneven, solar equipment cheaper, and consumers responded rationally. But when many users generate part of their own electricity, solar stops being only a consumer decision and becomes a power-system issue. This is not because solar is a mistake. It is because Pakistan's electricity system was built around centralised logic: large generation, top-down planning, one-way power flows, and consumers visible mainly through conventional billing. Distributed solar changes that picture. It places generation at the edge of the system, unevenly acros...