A deluge of solar panels and batteries from China has transformed Pakistan’s electricity sector, bringing huge benefits for consumers. Yet, there have been losers too: the nation’s already indebted energy industry, and a previous generation of China-backed and operated coal-fired power plants.
It’s a scenario that offers a glimpse into the complex future for the global energy transition — a transformation that China’s officials and exporters remain determined to lead.
About an hour’s drive east of Karachi, Pakistan’s coastal mega-city of more than 20 million people, a coal-fired power station hailed as a flagship project in China’s $1.5 trillion Belt and Road Initiative is being engulfed by a sea of solar.
Glinting arrays crown steel plants and manufacturing sites across a vast industrial zone of about 400 companies flanking the Arabian Sea at Port Qasim, part of a rapid — and largely unplanned — advance of renewable energy that’s added new risks to the nation’s already precarious energy economics.
“There are solar panels almost everywhere one sees,” says Zaheer Allana, owner of a packaging factory, where the rooftop is crowded with photovoltaic modules that generate about a fifth of the facility’s electricity needs. “We have utilized almost all available space,” he explains, as workers load burlap sacks onto delivery trucks. “If we had space, we would take it to 100%.”
Allana’s site, which churns out products like paper boxes and cups, added solar in 2022 to help limit its exposure to surging prices from Pakistan’s fossil-fuel dominated grid. The panels deliver power at less than one-third of the price, he said. “If we save through electricity, it is significant for us,” said Allana. “It all trickles down to the bottom line.”
Factories to farms and homes in the nation of more than 255 million people — about a fifth of whom live in poverty — are being transformed by a bottom-up, consumer-led torrent of solar installations. The technology accounted for about 20% of Pakistan’s electricity generation in 2025, up from roughly 3% at the start of the decade, according to Ember, an energy think tank.
High power costs, an unreliable grid and the availability of cheap panels — popularized through DIY installation tutorials on TikTok — made the nation China’s third-largest solar export market last year, and the equipment has become so ubiquitous that it’s now even being used as wedding dowry.
The scale of that clean energy influx has brought huge benefits for consumers. Solar has provided not only a cheaper source of power, it’s also added electricity access in some underserved regions. For industrial customers, it has softened the impact of power tariffs that are among Asia’s most expensive.
Yet dwindling demand for grid-supplied electricity has worrying consequences for both Pakistan and China. Declining margins for state-owned power utilities are straining the existing energy system, and complicating the task of repaying the Chinese companies that operate the nation’s largest coal-fired power plants.