Everyone loves rooftop solar. It looks shiny. It looks modern. It looks like progress. Net Bill Zero. Right ? But behind the glitter is a harsh reality. For LESCO and other distribution companies, rooftop solar is quietly bleeding them dry. And for Pakistan, it is more than just financial pain. It is a planning disaster.
LESCO has to buy electricity from Independent Power Producers. Every unit. Whether it is used or not. When households install solar and generate their own electricity, LESCO loses revenue. The bills to IPPs keep coming. The households that used to provide steady income now drain the system instead of supporting it.
Technically, rooftop solar is a headache. Our grid is designed for one-way flow. Solar pushes energy back into the network. Cheap inverters create harmonics. Transformers overheat and wear out faster. Voltage fluctuates. Faults become harder to detect. The grid becomes unstable.
Then comes the Duck Curve. During the day, solar floods the network and demand from the grid collapses. In the evening, solar drops but residential demand surges. The grid has to ramp up power fast. Thermal plants cannot switch off in the morning and start again at night. Hydropower cannot magically cover everything. The system becomes expensive, inefficient, and fragile.
Line losses are another story. Officially, they are rising. But much of it is theft and illegal connections. Paying households used to cover the cost of these hidden losses. Solar reduces their contribution. Now the cracks are visible and LESCO suffers.
Let us talk money. One household solar system costs about 5 lakh rupees. Multiply that by thousands of households and the number is staggering. That money could have built dams, protected farmland from floods, saved cattle, ensured irrigation, and solved power shortages. But no. Pakistan is obsessed with shiny roofs. We call it the Shiny Syndrome.
Other countries learned these lessons the hard way. Germany stopped net metering when rooftop solar destabilized the grid. Others followed. Pakistan imports the technology but not the lessons. We buy the glitter without understanding the cost.
Solar is clean. Solar looks good. But it is not free. It costs LESCO, it costs the government, and it costs Pakistan. Without proper planning, regulation, and system integration, rooftop solar will keep draining money, destabilizing the grid, and leaving the country to pay the bill.
Stop chasing glitter. Start planning systems. Shiny roofs today mean broken grids tomorrow.