6 ms·

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;

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. Isn't it insane?

wartywhoa23 6mo ago
> 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.
- GaggiX 6mo ago
  I'm not from Pakistan but Karachi is the only vertical city in Pakistan, most people lives in apartment buildings, I would suggest looking at other cities like Lahore.
- foragerdev 6mo ago
  Sorry, I fixed it to "Almost every". I agree, "Every" is overstated. I have never been to Karachi, what I know about Karachi, Karachi weather is not as harsh as Punjab or away from coastline so, you might survive (If you are used to living without AC) there without AC. And further, its hugely densely populate area so a lot of people might not have roof to install it. And Karachi gets people from the whole country and most of the people are living there temporarily, they might not want to commit on installing solar system on a rented house. That might be reason, but numbers speak themselves. Source: [https://www.ceicdata.com/en/pakistan/electricity-generation-and-consumption/electricity-consumption-total https://www.ceicdata.com/en/pakistan/electricity-generation-...]
mixermachine 6mo ago
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.
- healthy_throw 6mo ago
  Heat reduces solar production, ideally you have very sunny environment with about 25C / 77F.
  - adrianN 6mo ago
    Panels are cheap, efficiency is not that important.
  - patall 6mo ago
    Why is that always posted without stating the magnitude of the effect? The numbers that you find online are around 15% relative loss at 60°C vs. 25°C panel temperatur (I remember a HN comment reporting 12% comparing peak April to peak July). That is significant, but not world changing, especially for AC.
    - Gud 6mo ago
      What about panel degradation?
      - defrost 6mo ago
        There are 30 year old still functioning panels in Australia. Buried in that longevity, is an observation that a fifth of panels degrade faster than expected The long tail appears on graphs showing the degradation rate per year of the panels, indicating that up to 20% of all samples perform 1.5 times worse than the average. See (Uni NSW study) Cracking the ‘long tail’ problem: new research targets hidden solar panel issue (2026) - https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2026/01/research-targets-long-tail-solar-panel-issue https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2026/01/research-targe... and discussion: Maximising time in the sun: how to maintain and repair solar panels to make them last (2026) - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/13/maximising-time-in-the-sun-how-to-maintain-and-repair-solar-panels-to-make-them-last https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/13/maxim... This is more about the lifetime of many PV panels in Australia (temps to 45 C so far) not specifically about PV panels with many hours at > 50 C.
ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
Recent Bloomberg opinion pice about factories there and in nearby countries shifting to renewables: Asia’s Industrial Revolution Is Switching Off Gas https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-22/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.
actionfromafar 6mo ago
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070915
belorn 6mo ago
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.
aurareturn 6mo ago
The US can have this too if it stops demonizing China.
- raincole 6mo ago
  Have what? The US uses far more solar energy per capita than Pakistan.
  - hebelehubele 6mo ago
    Americans use more of everything. It's better to look at percentages than absolute values.
  - aurareturn 6mo ago
    Have extremely cheap solar panels. Solar energy per capita / income per capita. What results do you get? The fact that income is so high in America but solar panels are not ubiquitous everywhere.
    - BobaFloutist 6mo ago
      We can buy cheap solar panels in the US. It's just tying them into your houses wiring, and therefore the grid, that's expensive. That, and putting them on your roof (Because anything roofing is really expensive, which makes sense since roofing is in the top 5 most dangerous jobs in the US, and it sucks to do, and it doesn't even pay that well even still!)
torginus 6mo ago
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. sOcIaLiSM!!!
- foragerdev 6mo ago
  Yes, that's drive me insane, west which is biggest advocator of climate change and preaches renewable energy has not done as much as a poor country like Pakistan has done. And Pakistan is the one who is affected the most by the climate change. From September to February Pakistan AQI is basically unbreathable. Rain pattern is disturbed, winter has become shorter and summer has become longer, basically there is no spring or autumn, either it's summer or winter. EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.
  - spwa4 6mo ago
    It's not like Pakistan doesn't have these regulations, or doesn't try to tax solar power. It's just that the Chinese-Pakistan border is open and nobody's paying import taxes or listening to government regulations. So the problem in Western Europe is simply that government is actually effective. This generates surprising differences with Pakistan. The government is effective at forcing employers to actually pay their employees. The government is effective at giving women their rights. The government is effective at taxing solar power. All 3 differences are the same effect, really.
dyauspitr 6mo ago
Truly, you got to hand it to them. China has done the world a great service.

wartywhoa23 6mo ago

> 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.

GaggiX 6mo ago
I'm not from Pakistan but Karachi is the only vertical city in Pakistan, most people lives in apartment buildings, I would suggest looking at other cities like Lahore.
foragerdev 6mo ago
Sorry, I fixed it to "Almost every". I agree, "Every" is overstated. I have never been to Karachi, what I know about Karachi, Karachi weather is not as harsh as Punjab or away from coastline so, you might survive (If you are used to living without AC) there without AC. And further, its hugely densely populate area so a lot of people might not have roof to install it. And Karachi gets people from the whole country and most of the people are living there temporarily, they might not want to commit on installing solar system on a rented house. That might be reason, but numbers speak themselves. Source: [https://www.ceicdata.com/en/pakistan/electricity-generation-and-consumption/electricity-consumption-total https://www.ceicdata.com/en/pakistan/electricity-generation-...]

mixermachine 6mo ago

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.

healthy_throw 6mo ago
Heat reduces solar production, ideally you have very sunny environment with about 25C / 77F.
- adrianN 6mo ago
  Panels are cheap, efficiency is not that important.
- patall 6mo ago
  Why is that always posted without stating the magnitude of the effect? The numbers that you find online are around 15% relative loss at 60°C vs. 25°C panel temperatur (I remember a HN comment reporting 12% comparing peak April to peak July). That is significant, but not world changing, especially for AC.
  - Gud 6mo ago
    What about panel degradation?
    - defrost 6mo ago
      There are 30 year old still functioning panels in Australia. Buried in that longevity, is an observation that a fifth of panels degrade faster than expected The long tail appears on graphs showing the degradation rate per year of the panels, indicating that up to 20% of all samples perform 1.5 times worse than the average. See (Uni NSW study) Cracking the ‘long tail’ problem: new research targets hidden solar panel issue (2026) - https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2026/01/research-targets-long-tail-solar-panel-issue https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2026/01/research-targe... and discussion: Maximising time in the sun: how to maintain and repair solar panels to make them last (2026) - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/13/maximising-time-in-the-sun-how-to-maintain-and-repair-solar-panels-to-make-them-last https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/13/maxim... This is more about the lifetime of many PV panels in Australia (temps to 45 C so far) not specifically about PV panels with many hours at > 50 C.

ZeroGravitas 6mo ago

Recent Bloomberg opinion pice about factories there and in nearby countries shifting to renewables: Asia’s Industrial Revolution Is Switching Off Gas https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-22/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.

actionfromafar 6mo ago

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070915

belorn 6mo ago

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.

aurareturn 6mo ago

The US can have this too if it stops demonizing China.

raincole 6mo ago
Have what? The US uses far more solar energy per capita than Pakistan.
- hebelehubele 6mo ago
  Americans use more of everything. It's better to look at percentages than absolute values.
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  Have extremely cheap solar panels. Solar energy per capita / income per capita. What results do you get? The fact that income is so high in America but solar panels are not ubiquitous everywhere.
  - BobaFloutist 6mo ago
    We can buy cheap solar panels in the US. It's just tying them into your houses wiring, and therefore the grid, that's expensive. That, and putting them on your roof (Because anything roofing is really expensive, which makes sense since roofing is in the top 5 most dangerous jobs in the US, and it sucks to do, and it doesn't even pay that well even still!)

torginus 6mo ago

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. sOcIaLiSM!!!

foragerdev 6mo ago
Yes, that's drive me insane, west which is biggest advocator of climate change and preaches renewable energy has not done as much as a poor country like Pakistan has done. And Pakistan is the one who is affected the most by the climate change. From September to February Pakistan AQI is basically unbreathable. Rain pattern is disturbed, winter has become shorter and summer has become longer, basically there is no spring or autumn, either it's summer or winter. EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.
- spwa4 6mo ago
  It's not like Pakistan doesn't have these regulations, or doesn't try to tax solar power. It's just that the Chinese-Pakistan border is open and nobody's paying import taxes or listening to government regulations. So the problem in Western Europe is simply that government is actually effective. This generates surprising differences with Pakistan. The government is effective at forcing employers to actually pay their employees. The government is effective at giving women their rights. The government is effective at taxing solar power. All 3 differences are the same effect, really.

dyauspitr 6mo ago

Truly, you got to hand it to them. China has done the world a great service.