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Pakistan has built an incredible bottom-up decentralized solar surge similar in size to the entire national fossil fuel capacity - in two years!
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Reasons For Hope
The world-historic grassroots rooftop solar boom across Pakistan continues to amaze! Per a new Ember report, an astonishing 27 gigawatts (27,000 MW) of distributed solar (NOT on the grid) has been built in Pakistan in just the last two years! For context, 27 GW is about equal to the total capacity of all coal, oil, and gas plants EVER built in Pakistan!!! Absolutely extraordinary lightning-fast bottom-up progress.
This new solar more than covered a surge in electricity demand growth during those two years, as the economy kept growing, and is estimated to have saved Pakistan $12 billion in fossil fuel imports by February 2026 (so not even counting the Hormuz crisis). This solar surge is transforming Pakistani society, powering households, businesses, new irrigation wells, industry, a new frontier of EVs, and more.
In the world’s fifth most populous country, home to over 250 million people, a brand-new decentralized clean energy system built in two years is now roughly equal to the entire decades-old fossil capacity of the grid! This is unprecedented. A parallel national solarpunk energy system emerging unplanned alongside the old grid! If this kind of solar surge can be replicated across sub-Saharan Africa, the future of Anthropocene Earth could be a lot cleaner and brighter than anyone expected.
The United States is now a major fossil fuel exporter, and the U.S. fossil fuel industry has lately gained regulatory-capture levels of control over the executive branch in an effort to peddle more wares and slow down the advancing clean electric competition. But in 2025, fast-growing clean energy met all new global electricity demand and then some, with no growth for fossil fuels at all!
Congress needs to know that fossil fuels are already in structural decline worldwide, and that leading indicators like Pakistan’s distributed solar super-boom strongly suggest that this will accelerate faster than almost anyone now predicts.
Orienting policy around a fossil-fueled future is backing the wrong horse on a world-historic scale! Handouts to the fossil fuel industry must be curbed with strong legislative oversight, and attacks on America’s own hardworking electrotech champions must be stopped.
Tell Congress that fossil fuels are in structural decline worldwide!
Your Dose of Climate Hope is written by Sam Matey-Coste for Climate Action Now.
