Key takeaways
- Net billing shifts costs to compliant middle-class solar adopters.
- Theft by politically connected defaulters is spread across paying consumers.
- Free or subsidised units for officials undercut claims of fiscal necessity.
- Capacity payments push fixed costs onto a shrinking pool of grid users.
- Reform must start at the core: IPP contracts, enforcement and tariff transparency.
In this Minute Mirror column (February 2026), Dr. Ghulam Mohey-ud-din examines the shift from net metering to net billing for rooftop solar and argues that it is an example of reform that stops at the margins.
The argument
Households that installed solar panels were responding to earlier government signals. Changing the rules now penalises the compliant middle class while leaving the main causes of Pakistan’s electricity crisis in place.
The column identifies those causes. Electricity theft is concentrated in commercial and agricultural areas and among politically connected defaulters who rarely face disconnection, and their losses are redistributed to paying consumers. Public officials and institutions receive free or heavily subsidised units. And contracts with Independent Power Producers require capacity payments regardless of demand, so every unit that leaves the grid raises the fixed cost carried by those who remain.
Seen in that light, net billing addresses a symptom, cross-subsidisation between solar and non-solar users, while ignoring the distortions that create circular debt. The pattern is familiar: in fiscal stress, adjustment falls on visible, documented citizens while privileged groups are protected. When rule-followers pay and rule-breakers do not, compliance itself erodes. As the author puts it, rationalisation cannot attack the margins and leave the core alone.
What needs to change
- End free electricity units for public officials as a visible shared sacrifice.
- Enforce against large defaulters without discrimination.
- Renegotiate IPP capacity payments.
- Publish what each tariff pays for: theft, capacity payments and grid losses.
- Introduce time-of-use pricing that rewards solar exports at peak times, and widen solar finance for lower-income households.