Why solar is the dollar-pegged investment most Pakistanis can buy

A bill that won’t stop climbing

Muzamil opens the episode where most of the audience is already standing: in front of an electricity bill that keeps getting worse. His own Islamabad unit rate has reached roughly 60 rupees, and his read is that the number is going to keep climbing month on month with no obvious ceiling. The premise of the conversation is blunt — if you have ten lakh rupees or more sitting idle and quietly losing value, there may be a way to put it to work that also cuts a running cost that has started to pinch a lot of households.

That way is solar, and the guest is Bilal Naeem, CEO and founder of Beyond Green Solar, who has been in the business for the better part of eight years. Muzamil frames the regret most Pakistanis now feel: solar has been available here for a decade-plus, back when a grid unit cost twelve or fifteen rupees, and almost nobody took it seriously. It’s the same feeling, he says, as looking at an old Bitcoin or Apple chart and wishing you’d bought. Solar, in his framing, has quietly become an investment as much as a utility.

From door-knocking in Brisbane to a brand in Karachi

Bilal’s route into solar is not the one you’d guess. He was born and raised in Karachi, did his O-levels at Jaffer Public School, and was pushed by his family — Memon, comfortable with numbers — toward chartered accountancy. He got an economics exemption that gave him an early boost, but a few modules in he was, in his words, completely burnt out. He describes himself as more street-smart than studious. So he left, took the small bag of first-semester money his father gave him, and moved to Brisbane on the condition that he’d earn the rest himself.

The job he landed was telephone sales for a retail electricity company, switching customers between Australian retailers like Origin and AGL on commission. Then came door-to-door knocking at 300 dollars a sale. His first ever knock went badly — an aggressive resident who berated him off the property. What turned him around was the man’s own parting advice: you’ll never see me again, I’ll never see you again, this conversation is buried, so the only thing being hurt is your self-esteem — kill that and the money is yours. He internalised it, and from there became a sales consultant, then team leader, then national sales head, winning an award for the highest sales in Australia.

Solar entered the picture in 2011, when the Australian government was selling electricity at 8 cents a unit and offered to buy back exported solar units at 44 cents for five years, plus a roughly 3,000-dollar rebate on a five-kilowatt system. The commercial appeal was obvious — 300 dollars per kilowatt in commission and a product that sold itself — and Bilal spent the back half of the decade studying not just how to sell it but how the algorithm of net metering actually worked.

Registering the company before the market existed

In 2015, home on holiday, Bilal registered Beyond Green Solar in Pakistan — years before there was a market for it. At that point Pakistan had no net-metering concept at all; the only thing being sold was off-grid: an inverter, a battery, and a few glass panels on the roof. He brought an electrician an on-grid inverter to install and watched the man spend a full day just trying to understand it. The market wasn’t mature, so he opened a small shop in Karachi’s Saddar electronics market, branded it, and sold the panels the market actually wanted while he waited.

Net metering finally arrived in Pakistan in 2019, gated behind registration with the Alternative Energy Development Board — your company, your engineers, your experience — a long process. Bilal got his Australian passport on 5 and 6 May that year and flew back the next day, because the moment he’d registered the company for had come.

How net metering actually settles

The mechanics matter, and Bilal is careful with them. Net metering settles unit for unit. Everything you generate and consume yourself is invisible to the utility — Beyond Green’s app shows it, but K-Electric never sees those units. Whatever you export offsets, one-for-one, what you import, so your personal usage is fully cancelled out. The only cost on those traded units is sales tax.

The trouble starts when you try to become a producer rather than a self-supplier. The moment you ask to be paid for surplus beyond your own usage, the government balks — this is where its captive-power and capacity-payment problem surfaces, and where it has no appetite to pay out at off-peak rates. So Bilal’s standing advice is to size the system to your usage plus 10–20%, no larger. For a household with a 1,300–1,400 unit bill, that’s a 10 or 12 kilowatt system, a saving of a lakh to a lakh and a half, and a bill that lands at zero.

He’s equally direct about the anxiety in the news: a minister had just floated revisiting net-metering policy. Bilal’s answer draws on Australia, where the buyback rate fell from 44 cents to 8 over a decade. No government keeps the rate stable — it will change. But the unit-to-unit offset of your own consumption is the durable part, and that’s what the economics rest on.

The ROI that turns solar into an asset

Here is the number that reframes the whole thing. Taking a conservative blended rate of 40 rupees a unit — off-peak and on-peak averaged — Bilal says a system pays itself back in about three years, after which it returns roughly 33% a year with no further effort. As the unit rate climbs toward 100 rupees, that percentage only grows.

Muzamil layers on the currency argument, which is the part he’s most animated about. Energy is priced against the dollar; so is solar equipment. A Pakistani sitting on rupees is, in his words, burning money and finding nowhere dollar-denominated to put it. Solar is a back-door dollar investment. If you assume the rupee depreciates against the dollar at its long-run average of roughly 9% a year, the 33% return effectively becomes something closer to 42% — a return, both of them note, that isn’t on offer anywhere else for an ordinary household. “Solar lagana to sona hai is Pakistan mein,” Bilal says — putting in solar is gold in this country.

Why the technology anxiety is misplaced

The buyer, Muzamil observes, is rarely the thirty-year-old who’ll trust a slick pitch. It’s usually an older man who has earned over a lifetime and is now building the family home — a boomer, in the affectionate shorthand, who keeps his distance from a technology he doesn’t understand. Will it break in a year? Will he be climbing onto the roof to wipe off Karachi’s dust every other day? That fear, not the economics, is what stalls the sale.

Bilal’s answer is service. Beyond Green runs 24-hour remote monitoring — on engineers’ phones and on an office screen. A 10 kilowatt system should make 40–45 units on an average day; the app sets a daily benchmark off the morning weather, and if production drifts below it, an alarm trips before the client ever thinks to check. They recommend a wash every ten days, like watering a garden, and provide it. On equipment, he insists on Bloomberg-listed panels and inverters from companies financially stable enough to actually honour a 25-year warranty — LONGi, Jinko, Canadian Solar, Trina — because a warranty in Pakistan is too often given verbally, and an EPC contractor can only pass on a warranty the manufacturer behind it will own. Inverters, the component most likely to fail, get replaced within 24 to 48 hours.

The exporter’s forced hand

Solar in Pakistan is usually discussed as a household decision, but Bilal argues the more consequential case is industrial. Karachi’s manufacturers — Beyond Green counts names like Pepsi on its board — face two pressures at once. European buyers now require that 30–40% of the energy in imported goods be green, rising each year, so for an exporter solar has become a condition of selling at all. And at 58 rupees a unit, a Pakistani towel cannot compete with one from Bangladesh or India, because energy is the largest line on the cost sheet.

Run over a system’s twenty-to-twenty-five-year life, with maintenance folded in, that energy line drops to roughly 4 rupees a unit. The constraint is space: a factory’s roof might only take 300–350 kilowatts against a load of nearly two megawatts. Bilal’s workaround is to build the solar array as a waterproofed shed — PV sheets a foot below the panels, packed in at the sides — turning dead rooftop into a finishing or packing floor the government wouldn’t otherwise permit, on land that in Karachi is priced by the square foot.

Localisation, and the policy that isn’t there

Muzamil pushes on the obvious question: if both panels and inverters are dollar-priced, why not make them here? Bilal did the full feasibility three years ago — China, then Turkey for research. Land, labour and assembly all worked; cells and EVA sheet would still be imported, but glass and aluminium frames he could source locally. It died on five cents. China could deliver finished product at 19 cents; his costing came out at 24.

The missing piece is policy. Turkey protects local production with an import duty — LONGi’s imported panel sells there at 42 cents while a comparable local one sells at 32 — and without an equivalent duty and a long-horizon guarantee, no manufacturer will transfer the technology. Bilal says the offers exist: Bloomberg-listed top-five manufacturers are ready to come, especially with US sanctions pushing Chinese production into Vietnam and CPEC opening a tariff-free export path to European and US markets. What they want is a state assurance that the policy won’t flip in two or three years. He contrasts it with Qatar, which he says is offering Pakistani manufacturers co-investment, a 50/50 profit split and a ten-to-fifteen-year tax guarantee — and watching the country’s CEOs take the deal.

He has lived the policy whiplash himself. Mid-tenure, the previous government slapped a 17% sales tax on solar overnight; companies that had already taken 90% payment and promised installation couldn’t absorb it and folded. Beyond Green survived because it holds roughly six months of stock and only books what it can deliver — it will tell a customer to wait rather than commit on panels still on a ship. Today, he says, the tax and duty are gone and the process is smooth; the live constraint is the dollar, with banks now rationing import quotas against how much a company actually installs.

Solar as charity that doesn’t run out

The conversation closes on the part of the market the economics leave behind. Solar is still a commodity for the upper-middle class and above; Muzamil’s own driver is facing a 25,000-rupee bill he simply cannot absorb, and one month’s help doesn’t fix a number that recurs forever. The unromantic truth is that a system only pencils out at 10–15 kilowatts, where the ROI is strong — so what about the three- and five-marla home?

Muzamil makes a careful, deliberately uncomfortable point: Pakistan is a charitable country, but its charity isn’t always efficient. Give a man a fish and he’s back tomorrow. He’d rather direct giving toward education, health — the largest driver of poverty — and now, possibly, energy. Instead of handing his driver 25,000 rupees, he’d gather capital and install a system that sets the family up for twenty years.

Bilal already runs a CSR campaign along exactly these lines, funded from a portion of revenue. A small kit — one 150-watt panel, a battery, a charge controller, a one-KB inverter, costing somewhere between a lakh and a lakh and a half — gives an underprivileged home eighteen hours of non-stop fan, light and phone charging. When Muzamil suggests a website panel where others can order one of these kits for a household near them, Bilal takes the idea on air: a packaged product, claimed against a verified bill, that donors can fund through a proper channel.

The episode ends on a heavier note. Asked where he sees Pakistan in 2050, Bilal is candid to the point of despondency — he doesn’t believe the next generation will stay if conditions hold, and tells the story of a plot he can no longer sell because the builder has stopped answering the phone. He came back from Australia out of love for the country and a promise to his father; he is, by his own account, struggling to square that with what he now sees. The hope they land on isn’t governmental. As Muzamil puts it, the state doesn’t have the money to begin with — so the figuring-out, like the rooftop system, is something each household will have to do for itself.