Editorial
Pakistan has dropped a bombshell. The newly approved Nepra Presume Regulations 2026 fundamentally reshape how rooftop solar owners interact with the national grid. This isn’t tinkering at the margins. This is seismic change that will anger many, particularly those who invested heavily in solar installations under the old rules.
The biggest shift moves Pakistan from net metering to net billing. What does this mean? Simple. If you import a hundred units from the grid, you pay for them. Period. No more offsetting your electricity bill by feeding surplus solar power back into the system at retail rates. Four hundred thousand solar prosumers will now pay exactly like the thirty-three million other consumers who draw power from the grid. Purchase and sale become separate transactions.
The regulations also slash buyback rates for new solar connections. Existing installations can still receive the National Average Power Purchase Price of twenty-four rupees per unit until their terms expire. New connections get the National Average Energy Purchase Price, just nine rupees per unit, reflecting the marginal cost of generation without transmission charges and system fees.
Critics scream injustice. Why punish solar adopters for the system’s inefficiencies? Why not fix distribution losses and theft instead? But this argument misses the point. One inefficiency does not justify another. Solar capacity has crossed seven thousand megawatts. Pakistan is no longer experimenting. Countries like Australia, South Africa and Vietnam all rolled back generous solar incentives once critical mass was reached.
The technical justification matters too. Utilities must maintain idle capacity after sunset. Transformers face overloading from reverse power flow. The allowed solar capacity drops from one and a half times sanctioned load to just the sanctioned load itself. No new connections where transformer load exceeds eighty percent.
License terms shrink from seven years to five. Payback periods have doubled to five through eight years from two through four. In a world where battery storage looms as the next disruption, locking in longer terms carries risk. The regulations may anger early adopters, but they reflect Pakistan’s solar maturation. Fairness demands that electrons flowing both ways receive different treatment.
