[foragerdev]

Solar is not less than revolution in Pakistan. Almost every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs. More affluent houses have almost gone off grid; others are selling back to grid and others who can't afford has their own small scale 12V solar panels to run fans in the scorching summer of Pakistan to save electricity bills. It is all done by people independently without much support from the government as ROI (if you are using full potential of your installed capacity, it can be as low as 1 year and afterwords it will be free) is much better on solar than paying the grid.

I myself has got one my roof, 6KW with 5Kwh battery backup costing me 700K roughly 2500$. Now, I can use AC without thinking of electricity bills and the most importantly I do not have to face inconvenience of grid being not available in some cases for 24 hours.

Now Pakistan is facing energy crises not because it does not have enough, because it has too much as people are generating their own and due to nature of the contracts with electricity producing companies' government has to pay them according to their installed capacity not by generated.

According to a government report in 2021, 116,816Gwh was consumed commercially and in 2024 it stands at 111,110Gwh and in 25 and 26 in would be even lower.

Isn't it insane?

[ZeroGravitas]

Recent Bloomberg opinion pice about factories there and in nearby countries shifting to renewables:

Asia’s Industrial Revolution Is Switching Off Gas

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-22/asia-s...

> The Chief Financial Officer of Pakistan’s Fauji Cement Co. installed its first solar array in 2019 at Jhang Bhatar, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of the capital Islamabad. There are now 69 megawatts of panels across the company’s five main sites, at least twice what Tesla Inc. appears to have on the rooftops of its gigafactories in Nevada and Texas.1 They contribute about 23% of the company’s electricity, with a further 35% coming from recovering waste heat from its coal-fired clinker kilns.

[mixermachine]

Especially for hot and sunny areas solar is insane. At mid day, max heat, you get the peak production and can run your AC at full throttle. That enables you to efficiently work at nice temperatures.

[healthy_throw]

Heat reduces solar production, ideally you have very sunny environment with about 25C / 77F.

[patall]

Why is that always posted without stating the magnitude of the effect? The numbers that you find online are around 15% relative loss at 60°C vs. 25°C panel temperatur (I remember a HN comment reporting 12% comparing peak April to peak July). That is significant, but not world changing, especially for AC.

[Gud]

What about panel degradation?

[defrost]

There are 30 year old still functioning panels in Australia.

Buried in that longevity, is an observation that a fifth of panels degrade faster than expected

  The long tail appears on graphs showing the degradation rate per year of the panels, indicating that up to 20% of all samples perform 1.5 times worse than the average.  

See (Uni NSW study) Cracking the ‘long tail’ problem: new research targets hidden solar panel issue (2026) - https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2026/01/research-targe...

and discussion: Maximising time in the sun: how to maintain and repair solar panels to make them last (2026) - https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/13/maxim...

This is more about the lifetime of many PV panels in Australia (temps to 45 C so far) not specifically about PV panels with many hours at > 50 C.

[mixermachine]

It exists and does degrade panels but the time horizon is pretty wide. Real world data shows something like 0.5% to 0.7% degregation per year on average. At the start the degregation is higher and but it slows down with age.

So a 20 year old panel might be at around 80% in the worst case. Often they are in much better shape. This seems like a pretty good deal to me.

[dyauspitr]

Marginally. Between 77F and 100F you only lose about 5%, so you still get 95% of the stated max efficiency. It’s basically negligible and not really relevant.

[adrianN]

Panels are cheap, efficiency is not that important.

[torginus]

It is genuninely insane (in a good way!) I've encountered some degree of apprehension and disbelief from people in Western countries when I told them, that countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables, and even for the everyman, installing solar and having (a usually Chinese) EV just makes sense - economically, and not only in terms of saving the planet.

The markup on solar in Europe is insane, and it usually comes down to shitty government regulations - we were forced to upgrade to a 3 phase system (even though our net drain from the grid was looking to decrease), install a government monitoring and control system (and were locked out of some inverter settings), and install a lot of questionable 'safety' equipment (like a DC fire safety cutout, which some argue is even a bigger fire hazard than not having it), and basically all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.

Not to mention, all the red tape.

But in exchange we get to feed back to the power grid for like 5% of the original price. To be fair, we got a substantial subsidy and in the end, jumping through these hoops was only a bit more expensive that going at it by myself and installing the hardware we actually needed and paying for it out of pocket.

sOcIaLiSM!!!

[insane_dreamer]

> countries considered poor and backwards often are further along in the transition to renewables

This isn’t surprising; cell phones and mobile payments also took over much faster in Africa than Europe/US because the existing infrastructure (landlines, banks) was highly underdeveloped or unreliable.

[fc417fc802]

> all but being forced to install a grid-tie system, as isolated systems (that can take but not feed back to the grid) are a legal gray area.

Isn't that exactly backwards of what you'd naively expect? Peak regulatory dysfunction.

Are these mandated systems capable of operating in the event of a grid outage? I understand that a lot of US installs cheap out on the necessary component.

[foragerdev]

Yes, that's drive me insane, west which is biggest advocator of climate change and preaches renewable energy has not done as much as a poor country like Pakistan has done.

And Pakistan is the one who is affected the most by the climate change. From September to February Pakistan AQI is basically unbreathable. Rain pattern is disturbed, winter has become shorter and summer has become longer, basically there is no spring or autumn, either it's summer or winter.

EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.

[spwa4]

It's not like Pakistan doesn't have these regulations, or doesn't try to tax solar power. It's just that the Chinese-Pakistan border is open and nobody's paying import taxes or listening to government regulations.

So the problem in Western Europe is simply that government is actually effective. This generates surprising differences with Pakistan. The government is effective at forcing employers to actually pay their employees. The government is effective at giving women their rights. The government is effective at taxing solar power.

All 3 differences are the same effect, really.

[torginus]

You misunderstand. Nobody should be getting short changed (who doesn't deserve it).

It's just that the difference between the cost of something that's safe and effective and one that is ensured to be safe and effective by the govt should be no more than 10-20%.

Instead it costs 3x as much, and comes with mandatory government monitoring, and the sword of Damocles over your head that things are liable to change in the near future on the governments whim' instead of you owning the solar plant you have bought.

All the subsidies the government hands out are calculated for it to cover the cost of a self-install, and then maybe a bit. So tax money (which is YOUR money) gets used by the system to support itself rather than you, even when its supporting you.

[majoe]

> Yes, that's drive me insane, west which is biggest advocator of climate change and preaches renewable energy has not done as much as a poor country like Pakistan has done.

The "west" is not a single place and I hate that term, because it contains that "we against them" narrative, which is pushed on us from many directions in recent years. France, Germany or the USA all have a very different energy strategy, shaped by the availability of resources and geopolitics.

But for the average Joe, the situation across the globe and also in the "west" is not so different from what was described in other commments about Pakistan: People install solar on their rooftop, backyards, balconies etc. because it is dirt cheap now and amortises in a reasonable amount of time.

> EU has to do more and make it easier for them to install solar panels.

I can't speak for all countries in the EU, but at least in Germany, it's already quite easy and became even easier in recent years, e.g. private solar installations are exempt from various taxes.

The effort and money put into renewable energy in the EU is significant. In Germany around 60% of energy now comes from renewable energy [1] (Pakistan for comparison [2]), which was unthinkable 15 years ago. I remember quite well, that the fear mongers foretold, that we never will exceed 20% renewables or if we did, that the grid no longer will be reliable.

That said, you're right that the EU could and should do more. It feels like we're doing the "Energiewende" with one arm tied to the back. Unfortunately, there are many groups working against this goal by influencing the public opinion and it will stay like that for the foreseeable future.

[1] : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-renewab...

[2] : https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-electricity-low-car...

[ZeroGravitas]

Europe can and should do more but it also leads per capita solar installs.

[torginus]

Europe no longer can afford to act like it's in a privileged position, and one of the things it cannot afford is to spend exuberantly for the same results others get for the fraction of the price.

And I'm saying that with the best of intentions.

[aurareturn]

The US can have this too if it stops demonizing China.

[raincole]

Have what? The US uses far more solar energy per capita than Pakistan.

[aurareturn]

Have extremely cheap solar panels.

Solar energy per capita / income per capita. What results do you get?

The fact that income is so high in America but solar panels are not ubiquitous everywhere.

[BobaFloutist]

We can buy cheap solar panels in the US.

It's just tying them into your houses wiring, and therefore the grid, that's expensive. That, and putting them on your roof (Because anything roofing is really expensive, which makes sense since roofing is in the top 5 most dangerous jobs in the US, and it sucks to do, and it doesn't even pay that well even still!)

[hebelehubele]

Americans use more of everything. It's better to look at percentages than absolute values.

[belorn]

It is absolutely sane and perfectly reasonable. The climate highly support it, you are already used to a grid that in some cases are not available 24/7, and the major energy consumptions are AC and fans which correlate with production.

[dyauspitr]

Truly, you got to hand it to them. China has done the world a great service.

[actionfromafar]

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46070915

[wartywhoa23]

> Every home and factory has solar installed on their roofs.

Looking at Karachi's 2025 satellite imagery in Google Earth, I find this utterly overstated. Maybe 5% of houses have them on their rooves at best.

And that is in the largest city in Pakistan, where people ostensibly have much more money to throw at solar panels than in rural areas.

[GaggiX]

I'm not from Pakistan but Karachi is the only vertical city in Pakistan, most people lives in apartment buildings, I would suggest looking at other cities like Lahore.

[foragerdev]

Sorry, I fixed it to "Almost every". I agree, "Every" is overstated.

I have never been to Karachi, what I know about Karachi, Karachi weather is not as harsh as Punjab or away from coastline so, you might survive (If you are used to living without AC) there without AC. And further, its hugely densely populate area so a lot of people might not have roof to install it. And Karachi gets people from the whole country and most of the people are living there temporarily, they might not want to commit on installing solar system on a rented house.

That might be reason, but numbers speak themselves. Source: [https://www.ceicdata.com/en/pakistan/electricity-generation-...]