Here is a story I missed entirely: amid a spiralling economic crisis and recovering from a climate-fuelled, catastrophic flood in 2022, Pakistan imported at least 17 gigawatts of solar panels in 2024, making it the third-largest destination of Chinese solar exports, and the sixth-largest solar market globally. This amount is equivalent to more than a third of the country’s total installed capacity (46 GW as of June 2024).
The most stunning part: this surge was entirely driven by bottom-up, distributed demands from millions of farmers, businesses, and households. No coordinated government policy push or subsidies. Millions of Pakistanis, fed up with paying high prices (electricity tariffs rose by more than 150% since 2021) for unreliable power supplies, took things into their own hands and put cheap solar panels on their farms and roofs.
So far, this sounds like the breakout success of distributed renewables that we have all been waiting for. Renewables are supposed to democratise energy access and empower billions of people around the world. With renewables, people in poor countries don’t have to wait for governments and international lenders to build a grid for them. Pakistan is doing the distributed renewable revolution, at scale.
But the flip side of this story is that millions of Pakistanis, those who can’t afford their own solar panels, still have to rely on an aging, poorly planned, and managed, inefficient grid. These grid governance failures are what drove people to rooftop solar in the first place. Now, with a shrinking customer base, a bigger cost burden is on those who are left holding the bag.
Perhaps this is not the kind of energy revolution we want to see. The solution to universal clean energy access can’t be “build it yourself” and letting people fall through the crack if they can’t. Plus, a well-integrated and coordinated system with shared and pooled resources will be more resilient and efficient.
Transforming our energy systems (power grids, transportation, and more) requires coordinated actions. A build-it-yourself mentality breaks down our commitment to coordinate with each other. It might seem easier to give everyone free solar panels than confronting deep, complex conflicts in energy systems, but I’m afraid quick fixes don’t exist for planetary problems.
An Inconvenient Thought 