Same Sun, Different Stories: How India and Pakistan Are Rewriting the Renewable Energy Playbook

When you grow up in India, “power cut” isn’t an event — it’s a rhythm.

In our latest episode of Sustainability Forward, W talks about 40°C summer evenings where the fan stops, the street goes dark and neighbours shout “current chali gayi!” in unison. There’s always that one house that hums back to life — once a diesel generator, now a rooftop solar-and-battery system quietly keeping the lights on.

That image — one street, same heat, same sky, but very different levels of resilience — captures something deeper about the energy transition in South Asia.

In this episode (and in this article), we explore two intertwined stories:

• India, now a renewable energy heavyweight, racing towards 500 GW of non-fossil power while still leaning on coal.

• Pakistan, where the official grid still looks fossil-heavy, but a rooftop solar boom is transforming homes, factories and farms — often faster than policy can keep up.

If you’re interested in renewable energy in India, rooftop solar in Pakistan, or what the real, messy energy transition looks like in emerging markets, this one’s for you.

🎧 Listen to the full episode: Same Sun, Different Stories: The Renewable Boom in India & Pakistan

Why South Asia’s energy transition matters

Globally, the story is clear: most new power capacity being added is renewable energy, with solar power and wind power doing most of the heavy lifting. Agencies like IRENA and the IEA now expect renewables to supply a rapidly growing share of global electricity this decade.

Within that global shift, India and Pakistan are increasingly important:

• India is among the top countries in the world for installed solar and wind capacity, and a major driver of global renewable energy growth.

• Pakistan, despite chronic load shedding and power sector debt, has quietly become one of the world’s largest solar panel importers.

Yet the two countries are moving along very different paths — one largely top-down and utility-scale, the other driven bottom-up from rooftops and farm fields.

India: From power cuts to renewable energy powerhouse

On paper, India’s renewable energy story looks like a textbook case of a state-led transition:

• India has already reached a point where around half of its installed power capacity comes from non-fossil sources — including solar, wind, hydro and nuclear — several years ahead of its original target.

• The government continues to target around 500 GW of non-fossil power capacity by 2030, cementing India’s status as a global renewable energy leader.

On the ground, that ambition shows up in ways you can see from space. In Rajasthan’s Thar Desert, Bhadla Solar Park has grown into one of the largest solar parks in the world — a sea of panels that seems to run to the horizon.

Three levers behind India’s renewable energy surge

1. Clear national targets

Successive targets for 2020 and 2030 forced ministries and utilities to act, not just talk. Those numbers — 175 GW, then 450 GW, then 500 GW — created urgency and long-term visibility for investors in renewable energy projects.

2. Competitive auctions

A decade of reverse auctions drove solar tariffs and wind tariffs rapidly down, making solar power in India among the most affordable in the world. This gave developers confidence in a scalable, rules-based system and attracted domestic and international capital.

3. State-level champions

States like Gujarat, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka leaned in with:

• Land for large solar parks and wind farms

• “Green corridor” transmission lines for renewable energy integration

• State-level renewable purchase obligations and incentives

Gujarat and Rajasthan now each host tens of gigawatts of renewable capacity, comparable to entire countries.

The tension: renewables up, coal not down (yet)

Like most real-world transitions, the picture isn’t simple.

• Coal still provides the majority of India’s electricity generation, even as renewables dominate new capacity additions.

• India plans additional coal-fired power capacity to meet rapidly rising demand and provide firm power during evening peaks and low-renewable periods.

So India finds itself in a dual reality: a global poster child for renewable energy deployment, and at the same time one of the world’s largest coal power builders.

The grid is getting cleaner — but also more complex, with issues like:

• Curtailment of solar and wind when the grid can’t absorb all the output

• Congested transmission corridors from resource-rich states to demand centres

• Delayed projects due to land, permitting and grid connection challenges

In short: building renewable capacity is not the same as integrating it.

Pakistan: The world’s quiet rooftop solar giant

If you only read official statistics, renewable energy in Pakistan looks underwhelming. Grid-connected wind, solar and biomass still appear as a modest share of total generation.

But import data and on-the-ground reality tell a completely different story.

Over the last few years, Pakistan has:

• Imported tens of gigawatts of solar panels, making it one of the largest solar importers globally.

• Seen rooftop solar and small-scale solar systems spread across cities and rural areas, even while official renewable capacity looks small.

At the same time, solar’s role in the electricity mix has grown so quickly that in some months:

• Solar power has supplied a significant share of daytime electricity demand, particularly in urban and industrial hubs.

Crucially, this capacity isn’t all in giant solar parks. Much of it is distributed solar in Pakistan:

• Homes and apartment blocks trying to escape punishing bills and outages

• Shops, schools and mosques installing panels wherever they can find a bit of roof

• Industrial users, especially in cities like Lahore, Faisalabad and Sialkot, building large rooftop systems to keep factories running

In many neighbourhoods, rooftop solar and batteries are now as common as diesel generators used to be.

The three fault lines in Pakistan’s solar boom

The story is impressive — but it comes with serious challenges. In the episode, we focus on three fault lines:

1. Grid finances

2. Groundwater and solar irrigation

3. Energy inequality and who gets to “exit” the grid

1. Grid finances and circular debt

Pakistan’s power sector has been struggling with circular debt for years — a chain of unpaid bills where distribution companies don’t collect enough revenue, so they can’t pay generators, who then can’t pay fuel suppliers.

At the same time:

• Transmission and distribution losses remain high.

• A significant share of electricity that is generated never shows up as paid-for energy.

Now add rooftop solar:

• Wealthier households, businesses and industry install net-metered rooftop solar to cut their bills.

• They buy less from the grid, but the grid’s fixed costs remain — power plants, transmission lines, capacity payments and legacy debt.

• That cost gets pushed onto a shrinking base of customers who can’t afford solar.

As a result, Pakistan is actively debating and revising its net metering policy, including:

• Cutting the “buy-back” rate for surplus solar exported to the grid

• Moving towards net billing to reduce cross-subsidies from poorer consumers to richer ones

From a system perspective, this is about survival. From a consumer perspective, it can feel like the rules are changing halfway through the game.

2. Solar-powered irrigation and groundwater depletion

The second fault line lies underground.

In Punjab and other agricultural regions, farmers are rapidly switching from diesel pumps to solar-powered tube wells. It’s easy to see why:

• No diesel costs

• No dependence on unreliable grid power

• Predictable daytime pumping

But when energy feels “free”, water use often explodes. We see:

• Expansion of water-intensive crops such as rice

• More hours of pumping

• Faster depletion of already stressed aquifers

Solar irrigation is good for emissions and farmer economics, but without strong groundwater governance it risks driving Pakistan towards a water crisis.

3. Energy inequality: who gets to exit the grid?

Finally, there’s a question of who benefits from Pakistan’s rooftop solar boom:

• Most solar adopters today are households and businesses with capital, credit and a suitable roof.

• Poorer consumers, renters, and people in dense urban housing often cannot install solar even if they want to.

If current trends continue:

• A few hundred thousand better-off solar users could enjoy dramatically lower bills and better reliability.

• The rest of the country could face higher tariffs to pay for grid fixed costs and capacity payments.

Solar becomes both a lifeline and a fault line:
a way to escape the broken system if you can afford it, and a source of higher costs if you can’t.

What India and Pakistan tell us about the global energy transition

Taken together, these stories challenge some of the usual narratives about climate and energy.

Here are a few big lessons that came out of the episode.

1. The energy transition is no longer a “rich country” story

• India’s targets and rapid build-out show that large emerging economies can scale clean energy at speed.

• Pakistan’s bottom-up rooftop solar revolution shows that even a financially stressed, import-dependent system can see explosive clean energy growth when economics align.

2. Distributed solar changes power dynamics — literally and politically

In both countries, but especially in Pakistan, distributed solar reshapes:

• Who has reliable power

• Who controls generation assets

• How utilities recover costs and manage risk

It’s not just about electrons; it’s about who gets to opt out of a broken system and who is left behind.

3. Climate solutions will create new resource stresses

Solar in Pakistan reduces fuel imports and emissions — but intensifies pressure on groundwater when it is used to power uncontrolled pumping.

Any serious conversation about renewable energy in South Asia has to integrate:

• Water policy

• Agricultural policy

• Social policy and equity

not just power sector reform.

4. Both top-down and bottom-up transitions have limits

• India’s top-down, utility-scale model has delivered impressive capacity, but now bumps up against grid bottlenecks and the inertia of coal.

• Pakistan’s bottom-up rooftop model is empowering consumers and cutting emissions, but risks weakening utilities, deepening inequality and accelerating water stress.

The future lies in aligning these forces — using policy and market design so that citizen-led solar revolutions strengthen, rather than undermine, national energy systems.

Want to go deeper? Listen to the full conversation

This article only scratches the surface of what we cover in the episode:

• W’s memories of growing up with Indian power cuts

• The politics behind India’s coal “safety blanket”

• Everyday stories from Pakistan’s rooftop solar and battery boom

• What a fair solar future might look like in South Asia

🎧 Listen to the full episode: Same Sun, Different Stories: The Renewable Boom in India & Pakistan

If you work in energy, climate, infrastructure or development, or you’re just curious about how the energy transition actually feels in people’s homes and businesses, we’d love your thoughts.

• Are we underestimating the impact of rooftop solar in Pakistan and other emerging markets?

• What would a just energy transition look like in your country?

Share your perspective with us — and if the episode resonates, pass it on to someone stuck in a “load-shedding updates” WhatsApp group or trying to convince their family to go solar.