Power Minister Awais Leghari said the government is working to introduce a virtual grid system in the country, under which consumers would be able to generate and store their own electricity. Speaking to media after a National Assembly panel meeting, the minister said work on regulations for virtual grids had already started and that the framework would be finalised by the last quarter of the current fiscal year, giving the initiative a concrete though still distant timeline. The virtual grid concept adds a consumer facing dimension to a broader battery storage push the government has been building over the past year, one that has so far focused mainly on utility scale deployments and grid stability rather than individual household or small business level generation and storage.
Leghari said power distribution companies (Discos) have been directed to install batteries on their own grids as part of efforts to improve the power system and promote energy storage more broadly. “A battery revolution is coming to Pakistan as the government seeks to promote battery use and introduce a virtual grid system,” he said, adding that the government’s objective is to increase the use of batteries across the country’s power sector. The minister has repeatedly framed battery energy storage systems (BESS) as central to Pakistan’s energy transition in recent months, previously telling a BESS conference organised by the Pakistan Solar Association that battery storage offers grid operators the flexibility needed to integrate a growing share of renewable energy, and that without it, the country’s solar success risks becoming a curtailment problem rather than a national asset.
Beyond the virtual grid announcement, Leghari faced pointed questioning at the National Assembly Standing Committee on Power over prolonged load-shedding, acknowledging that outages were being carried out on around 3,500 of the country’s 14,500 feeders due to electricity theft and line losses. He said that within a year, the government plans to shift load-shedding from feeders to transformers so that an entire feeder does not have to be shut down when only part of it needs to be curtailed, introducing an on-off control system for around 190,000 transformers to make this more targeted approach possible. Under this system, consumers who regularly pay their electricity bills would not be affected by outages caused by theft or losses elsewhere on the same feeder, a shift that would require significant investment in transformer level monitoring and control infrastructure across the national grid.
Leghari said there was currently no additional load-shedding in the country beyond what is caused by faults from overloading, and that heavy investment is required to upgrade the power system, with approval to be sought from the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority (Nepra) for the necessary upgrades. He also addressed the impact of the Strait of Hormuz closure on the Petroleum Division’s ability to receive LNG cargoes, saying the government has turned to locally produced gas for power generation as a result, with one gas cargo that previously cost around $30 million now costing more than $95 million. Whether the virtual grid system and transformer level load-shedding controls deliver the flexibility and cost savings Leghari has described will likely depend on how quickly the promised regulations are finalised and how effectively Discos execute the required battery and transformer infrastructure upgrades across a grid that continues to grapple with theft, line losses, and rising fuel costs simultaneously.
Follow the SPIN IDG WhatsApp Channel for updates across the Smart Pakistan Insights Network covering all of Pakistan’s technology ecosystem.
