Arshad Mahmood Awan
Pakistan’s power sector has spent the better part of two years trying to find its footing. What looked, at certain moments, like a gradual recovery has now run into a wall. The numbers for the first ten months of fiscal year 2026 tell a story that policymakers cannot afford to read selectively. Cumulative generation stood at 99 billion kilowatt hours, nearly eight percent below the peak recorded in the same period of fiscal year 2022. That is not a minor statistical gap. It represents a system that has not recovered from its demand collapse and, if anything, is discovering new reasons to worry.
The situation deteriorated further in April. Actual generation came in at 9.4 billion units against a planned reference of 10.6 billion units. That eleven percent shortfall is, by most assessments, the largest negative deviation from reference generation seen in recent years. It did not arrive without warning, but the scale of it still demands attention. The system was already operating below the levels of fiscal year 2021, and only marginally ahead of last year. For a country that has invested heavily in expanding generation capacity and has repeatedly adjusted tariffs to bring industrial consumers back to the grid, this trajectory is deeply troubling.
The most immediate cause of the April collapse was the failure of regasified liquefied natural gas supply. Qatar’s declaration of force majeure left Pakistan with little to no imported LNG available for power generation for the second consecutive month. The consequences were severe. RLNG’s share in the generation mix fell to just four percent, against a planned share of eighteen percent. Actual RLNG generation recorded only 380 million units, less than a quarter of reference levels and the lowest monthly figure in 111 months. To put that plainly, Pakistan was generating less RLNG-based power in April 2026 than at any point since it began importing LNG as a fuel source.
The reality beneath that figure is even more uncomfortable. The 380 million units attributed to RLNG plants did not actually come from imported gas. Domestic natural gas was diverted toward power plants originally designed and contracted to run on RLNG, and the output was classified under the RLNG category simply because the pricing structure resembles gas-fired generation. The implication is straightforward. Pakistan’s most flexible, most efficient thermal fleet is now running on a substitute fuel that it was never built to rely upon exclusively. The operational and commercial consequences of that mismatch will compound over time.
With RLNG unavailable and hydroelectric generation also running roughly twelve percent below reference levels, the system had to find electricity somewhere. It found it in imported coal and furnace oil plants, which together exceeded their planned generation by approximately 1.1 billion units to keep supply from collapsing entirely. That gap was filled, but not without cost. Fuel charges overshot reference levels by roughly 1.7 rupees per unit, producing the fifth consecutive monthly positive fuel cost adjustment. What makes this particularly significant is the nature of the problem. Previous positive adjustments were largely driven by expensive fuel. This one is driven by inflexibility. The system is paying a premium not just for fuel costs but for the absence of the right kind of fuel in the right kind of plant.
There is a structural dimension to this crisis that goes beyond the immediate disruption of LNG supply. Pakistan’s electricity demand profile has shifted in fundamental ways over the past two years. The rapid expansion of rooftop and behind-the-meter solar installations has hollowed out daytime demand on the national grid. Midday demand continues to fall sharply during peak solar hours even as overall electricity consumption rises. The result is a pronounced duck curve, the pattern where grid demand drops steeply during the day and then spikes sharply in the evening when solar generation disappears and households and businesses draw heavily from the grid.
Under normal circumstances, RLNG plants were the answer to that evening ramp. Their operational flexibility made them ideal for absorbing large, rapid increases in demand after sunset. That capacity is now unavailable. The ramping burden has shifted to generation sources that are slower to respond, less efficient to operate and more expensive to run. The structural mismatch between the demand profile the system now faces and the generation assets currently available to meet it is not a problem that resolves itself quickly.
The substitution options are limited. Domestic natural gas, even fully mobilised, cannot replace what imported LNG provided. The dependable generation capacity of domestic gas-fired plants is roughly one-quarter that of RLNG-based plants. Running every available domestic gas unit at maximum output cannot close that gap, certainly not during peak evening hours when the grid is under the greatest stress. The mathematics simply do not work in Pakistan’s favour.
This leaves two futures, neither of them comfortable. The first is a continued reliance on expensive generation sources dispatched out of necessity, with upward pressure on fuel adjustments feeding through into tariff revisions that households and industries will eventually absorb. The second is a return to intensified load shedding during evening peaks, particularly in the months ahead when both demand and the absence of RLNG flexibility will be felt most acutely. In practice, the outcome is likely to be some combination of both.
The broader context makes this harder to resolve quickly. The disruption to global LNG supply caused by the United States and Israel conflict has placed Pakistan in a position of energy vulnerability that no domestic policy adjustment can fully offset. Pakistan did not choose this situation. But it is living with its consequences, and the power sector is where those consequences are most visible to ordinary citizens.
Tariff cuts and industrial incentives can coax consumers back to the grid. They cannot conjure gas that is not there. That is the problem Pakistan’s power planners now face, and there are no easy answers waiting on the other side of it.
