The state has announced 2.25 hours of daily peak-time load management and presented it as a way to prevent a sharper tariff shock: in present circumstances, that is a defensible call. A country already burdened by inflation cannot casually push another Rs5 to Rs6 per unit onto households and industry when an external war has disrupted LNG flows and tightened the regional energy market. Pakistanis know the hardship of power cuts. They also know the cost of chaos. Faced with a constrained choice, the government has opted for a limited and declared burden instead of a larger and lasting one.
That does not erase the public pain. In Karachi and other cities, interrupted power means stalled kitchens, delayed shop work, disturbed study hours, and a familiar strain on homes that plan each evening around electricity, water, and heat. The frustration is real. So is the national setting in which this decision has been taken. Pakistan did not create the war-driven volatility now running through fuel routes and global energy prices. It is absorbing another imported shock while trying to protect social stability.
The harder point is that Pakistan is no longer where it was a decade ago. The country has more policy clarity on energy efficiency, more experience with demand management, more room for indigenous fuels, and a sharper understanding of how overdependence on imported energy weakens sovereignty. NEPRA’s latest review shows the burden plainly, with total power purchase cost in FY2024-25 at about Rs2.94 trillion and capacity payments taking the largest share. It also shows where the fault lines lie. Local sustainable resources have not yet been used to their fullest possible advantage, while imported fuels still keep the system exposed to events far beyond Pakistan’s borders.
That should frame the national response. Parliament should treat energy security as an economic and strategic matter at once. More pertinently, the 2023 energy conservation building code should be enforced in major urban centres, especially in public buildings and commercial districts that waste power with impunity.
There is also a deeper national argument here. Pakistan cannot talk seriously about resilience while treating rooftop solar, conservation, and local resource planning as side debates. The finance minister’s call for renewable expansion and a strategic petroleum reserve should become state policy with legislative backing.
The immediate cuts are unpleasant, yet they are also a reminder that prudence under pressure is part of statecraft. Pakistan should neither romanticise hardship nor politicise every emergency. It should use this one well, tighten the system, protect the public, and come out of the crisis less exposed than before. *