Consider a roof. On it, a lattice of dark panels drinks the Punjab sun, and beneath it a family no longer flinches when the bill arrives. They have done nothing wrong. They have, by every measure we usually praise, done something right: they invested, they conserved, they freed themselves from a creaking and corrupt utility that has failed them for decades. And yet I want to ask, gently, whether a thousand virtuous private acts can amount to a public wrong — and if so, who exactly committed it.
The grid was always more than wires. It was a promise, half-kept and half-broken, that the cost of keeping the lights on would be shared across a nation — that the factory in Faisalabad and the widow in Larkana drew from the same pooled effort, the same pooled debt. Economists call electricity infrastructure a network good: its costs are mostly fixed, sunk into transmission lines and capacity payments owed to power plants whether or not a single bulb burns. Those fixed costs do not vanish when a household installs solar. They merely fall on fewer shoulders. The arithmetic is pitiless. As the able-bodied climb onto the lifeboat, the ship they leave does not sink faster only because they are gone — it sinks faster because their share of the bailing now belongs to those too poor to climb.
This is the heart of what is being argued over this season, beneath the dry language of NEPRA’s new prosumer regulations and the much-resented shift from net metering to net billing — from buying back a household’s surplus power at roughly the retail rate to buying it at a fraction of it. The solar enthusiast cries betrayal: the state lured us toward the sun and now claws back the reward. The utility cries fairness: you used our grid as a free battery, exporting by day and drawing by night, paying almost nothing for the standby capacity held in reserve for you. Both are correct, which is the surest sign that the real question lies underneath them.
That deeper question is one the philosophers would recognize. When an institution decays, the political theorist Albert Hirschman taught, those bound to it have two recourses: voice, the labour of staying and complaining and reforming; or exit, the quiet act of simply leaving. Voice is how we improve a thing we cannot abandon. Exit is what we choose when we can. And here is the cruelty embedded in our solar boom: exit is rationed by wealth. The man who can afford panels and a battery buys his way out of the argument entirely. He no longer needs the grid to work, so he no longer fights to make it work. His voice — informed, propertied, politically audible — falls silent precisely where it was most needed. What remains on the grid is a population with grievance but no leverage, voice without volume.
We should be careful not to moralize against the household on the roof. To demand that the able stay chained to a sinking institution for the sake of solidarity is its own quiet tyranny — and besides, no family owes its evenings to a system that gave them load-shedding and inflated bills in return. The fault was never the prosumer’s. It was the long, bipartisan refusal to fix the grid while it could still be fixed — the unpaid circular debt, the theft tolerated, the capacity contracts signed in dollars and paid by the powerless. Solar did not break the grid. It revealed, like a falling tide, what was already broken beneath.
So the panels are not the disease; they are the diagnosis. They tell us that the social contract of the wire — pool the cost, share the risk, light the nation as one — has quietly lapsed, and that the rich have read the verdict first, as they always do. There is an Urdu phrase for the instinct: apni jaan bachao — save your own skin. It is not contemptible. It is human. But a republic cannot be built from a thousand skins each saved alone.
The temptation now is to punish the exit — to tax the sun, to make leaving expensive enough that the able stay imprisoned with the poor. This solves nothing; it merely redistributes resentment. The only answer worth the name is to make the grid once more a thing the able might choose to stay for: a battery for the nation’s surplus sunshine, a buyer and seller both, valuable enough that even the man with his own panels wants to remain connected to his neighbours. The question was never how to stop people from leaving. It was always, and remains, why we built something so few wished to stay in.
Exit is rationed by wealth. The man who can afford a battery buys his way out of the argument entirely — and his voice falls silent precisely where it was most needed.
Solar did not break the grid. It revealed, like a falling tide, what was already broken beneath.
