Pakistan gets almost all its oil and gas from the Middle East, where U.S. and Israeli bombing of Iran have caused crude prices to blow past $150 a barrel<\/a> and tankers can\u2019t get through the Strait of Hormuz. But it has one edge in the crisis: a rapid, recent shift to solar power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The country\u2019s solar boom<\/a> started in the wake of the Ukraine war, when Pakistan couldn\u2019t afford to buy liquefied natural gas and that led to power outages. \u201cIt also led to soaring electricity bills,\u201d says Rabia Babar, an energy market analyst at the Pakistan-based nonprofit Renewables First<\/a>.<\/p>\n Some power bills were as much as 30-40% of people\u2019s income, sometimes more than they were spending on rent. At the same time, the price of solar panels had steeply fallen, with an oversupply from Chinese manufacturers that was easily accessible in Pakistan. And so people started buying and installing solar\u2014often to avoid using grid power.<\/p>\n \u201cYou could go to your local bodega, buy a solar panel and charge controller and a battery, and install it yourself,\u201d says Jigar Shah, an energy entrepreneur and investor\u00a0who previously led the Loans Program Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. \u201cIt was so cheap that people were able to do it with discretionary funds, $50 that they had.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A grassroots DIY movement quickly grew. Self-taught solar entrepreneurs learned about installation and repair on YouTube and in local WhatsApp groups. As people installed solar on their roofs, their neighbors followed. Businesses added solar and batteries on factory buildings. Farmers started using solar pumps, rather than diesel, for irrigation. Cheap solar panels also helped bring power to rural homes that had always been off the grid. Last year, the country was the second-largest importer of Chinese solar panels in the world. Ten percent of the grid shifted to solar in just a few years, driven largely by these small installations.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you think about the sheer volume and the population of Pakistan, it certainly is the largest deployment of solar and battery storage to solve energy poverty in the world,\u201d Shah says. <\/p>\n Over the last nine years, the country has imported a massive 51 gigawatts of solar power. (For comparison, that\u2019s more than the entire capacity of power plants on the country\u2019s electric grid.) That\u2019s helped Pakistan avoid spending more than $12 billion on fossil fuel imports, according to a report from Renewables First. This year, as crude prices have surged, the country could save another $6.3 billion. (Pakistan still relies almost entirely on fossil fuels for transportation, as EV adoption in the country is at an earlier stage. )<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit,w_1024\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/03\/i-2-91512393-pakistan-solar.jpg\")