Capacity Payments in Pakistan: Why Your Electricity Bill Is So High in 2026

A plain-English guide to the 40 percent of your bill nobody explains

By Asad Baig · Lahore · April 2026 · Approx. 16-min read

The bill arrives

Open your latest electricity bill. Look at the number at the bottom.

If you are a middle-class Pakistani household, that number is probably somewhere between Rs. 15,000 and Rs. 30,000. If you run a small business, it might be Rs. 80,000. If you are like my friend Imran, who runs a printing press in Anarkali, your monthly bill went from Rs. 45,000 a year ago to Rs. 1,30,000 today, for the same eight machines, running the same eight hours a day.

That is the part of the story everyone sees. The bill arrives. The number is too high. The household budget tightens. The business decides whether to fire a worker or close.

The part nobody explains is what is actually inside that number. What you are paying for. Who receives it. And why no government for thirty years has been able to bring it down.

This article is about one specific component of your bill, the largest component. It is called the capacity payment. It is approximately 40 percent of every rupee you pay for electricity. It is the single biggest driver of why bills in Pakistan are now double what industries pay in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and India.

I am going to explain it the way I had to learn it. In plain English. With the numbers documented. So that the next time someone tells you that your bill is high because of theft, or because of the rupee, or because of the previous government, you will know what is actually true.

What is in your electricity bill

Before we get to capacity payments specifically, look at where every rupee on your bill goes.

The Power Sector Inquiry Report of 2020, the International Growth Centre's 2025 work on Pakistan, and the IEEFA reports by Haneea Isaad have all documented the breakdown. The numbers vary by a percentage point or two from year to year, but the structure is stable.

WHAT EVERY RUPEE OF YOUR ELECTRICITY BILL ACTUALLY PAYS FOR

Approximately 40 rupees go to capacity payments, for the existence of plants, whether or not those plants produce electricity for you.

Approximately 25 rupees go to fuel, the actual cost of running the plants that do produce.

Approximately 20 rupees go to transmission and distribution losses, including theft.

Approximately 15 rupees go to government taxes, surcharges, and the operating costs of your distribution company.

Read that breakdown again. The largest single component of your bill is not for electricity. It is for the contractual right of certain power plants to exist.

That is the number this article is about.

What is a capacity payment, in plain English

A capacity payment is money the Pakistani government pays a power plant owner whether or not that plant produces any electricity. It is not for the power. It is for the existence of the plant.

Let me explain it the way I had to learn it.

Imagine you sign a contract with a taxi driver. The contract says: you must pay him Rs. 5,000 a day, every day, for the next thirty years, whether you take a ride or not. If you call him for a ride, you pay extra for the petrol. But the Rs. 5,000 a day is fixed. It is for "being available."

Now imagine you signed this contract when you owned three businesses and travelled a lot. Then your businesses closed. You are now sitting at home. You do not need a taxi. The driver does not drive anywhere. He just sits in his car. You still pay him Rs. 5,000 a day. Every day. For thirty years. Because the contract said so.

That is a capacity payment.

Pakistan has signed about a hundred such contracts. Together, they cost us roughly Rs. 2 trillion a year. That is more than our entire defence budget. It is more than what we spend on health and education combined. It is paid whether the country uses the electricity or not.

Some of these contracts were signed with foreign investors. Some with approximately forty Pakistani business families. Some with Chinese state-owned companies under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. The terms are slightly different in each case. But the structure is the same: pay us for our existence, whether we produce or not.

The Rs. 46 billion that bought zero electricity

If the taxi-driver analogy still feels abstract, here is the concrete version.

In the financial year 2023-24, two specific power plants in Pakistan, HUBCO and KAPCO, received approximately Rs. 46 billion from the Pakistani government. In that same year, those two plants produced exactly zero units of electricity. Not low production. Zero. They sat there. We paid them.

This is not a leak from a confidential document. The figure was confirmed publicly by Gohar Ejaz, the former federal minister, in July 2024. He showed the data on television. Nobody disputed it. Because nobody could.

In the same year, forty-one other plants in Pakistan operated at four to twenty-five percent of their nominal capacity. They produced very little. They received their full capacity payments anyway.

To put this in perspective: Pakistan has built power plants with a total installed capacity of 45,605 megawatts. Our peak national demand is approximately 28,000 to 30,000 megawatts. We have, at all times, more than 15,000 megawatts of capacity that nobody uses. We pay for all of it. The cost of the unused capacity alone is approximately Rs. 700 billion per year.

THE FIRST FACT TO INTERNALISE

Pakistan built power plants to generate 45,605 MW. Pakistan uses, at peak, 28,000-30,000 MW. Pakistan pays for all 45,605 MW every single day. The 15,000+ MW of permanently unused capacity costs roughly Rs. 700 billion per year. This is not a temporary mismatch. It is a structural feature of the contracts.

How we got here, the four mechanisms

The capacity-payment system did not arrive in one decision. It was built over thirty years through four specific mechanisms, each one negotiated into contracts that successive governments either expanded or refused to reopen.

If you understand these four mechanisms, you understand why your bill rises every year regardless of which party is in power.

1. Take-or-pay

The first mechanism is the structure itself. The contracts Pakistan signed with private power producers are called "take-or-pay" agreements. The phrase means exactly what it sounds like: the government must take the electricity, or it must pay anyway.

If the country needs the power, the plant runs and is paid. If the country does not need the power, the plant sits idle and is paid. There is no version of the contract in which the plant produces nothing and the government pays nothing.

Take-or-pay was sold, in 1994, as the price of attracting investment. Foreign investors, the argument went, would not put up the capital for a power plant unless the government guaranteed they would be paid regardless of demand. This was the bargain. Pakistan accepted it.

What was not made public, in 1994 or in any year since, was that this single provision, combined with the other three I will describe, would lock the country into paying for capacity it did not need for thirty years.

2. Dollar indexation

The second mechanism is the currency in which capacity payments are calculated. The contracts were not denominated in rupees. They were denominated in US dollars.

This means that when the rupee falls against the dollar, which it has done many times, sometimes catastrophically, the rupee amount Pakistan must pay rises automatically. The investor takes no currency risk. The Pakistani consumer takes all of it.

In 1994, when the contracts were signed, the rupee traded at approximately 30 to the dollar. Today it is approximately 280. The rupee value of those original capacity payment obligations has multiplied roughly nine-fold purely from currency depreciation. Not because demand rose. Not because plants did more work. Purely because the rupee fell.

This is why your bill rises in years when nothing else has changed. Dollar indexation flows directly into the per-unit tariff, which flows directly into your monthly bill.

3. The capital cost trick

The third mechanism is the most damaging, and the most quietly engineered. To explain it, I need to walk through how the tariff is calculated.

When an investor builds a power plant, the capacity payment is set as a percentage of what the contract calls the "capital cost" of the plant, the total amount the investor claims to have spent building it. If the real cost was $200 million, the tariff is set on $200 million. If the contract allows the investor to bill on $400 million, the tariff is set on $400 million. The consumer pays double, perfectly legally, under the terms of the agreement.

Notice what this means. The investor has every reason to make the stated capital cost as high as possible. The higher the cost, the higher the payment. Forever.

The 2020 Power Sector Inquiry Report, headed by Muhammad Ali, the former Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan chairman, found that capital costs for Pakistani IPPs were systematically inflated. Some 1994-era plants had effective capital costs three to four times higher than comparable plants in Bangladesh and Vietnam. There is no honest engineering reason for this. Concrete is concrete. Steel is steel. Turbines from Siemens cost the same in Karachi as they do in Dhaka. The difference, the inquiry found, was in the books, not in the plants. Costs had been inflated through over-invoicing on equipment, inflated engineering services contracts, and aggressive depreciation schedules.

HUBCO, Pakistan's first major IPP, had a projected capital cost of approximately $1.2 billion in 1988. By 1995, when the plant was financially closed, the stated capital cost had risen to $1.766 billion, a 47 percent increase. The reasons offered included the Gulf War, currency volatility, and design changes. The reality, subsequent investigations would suggest, was different.

Once an inflated capital cost is locked into a Power Purchase Agreement, it is legally protected. Pakistani regulators cannot easily challenge it without triggering international arbitration. The fraud, if it could be called that, was committed at the moment of contract signing, and rendered legally untouchable thereafter.

4. The capacity-payment formula itself

The fourth mechanism is the formula that converts the inflated capital cost into your monthly bill.

The 1994 Power Policy guaranteed investors a return on equity of 15 to 18 percent, paid in dollars, every year, for 25 to 30 years. To put this in perspective, an investor in the United States in 1994 was earning approximately 7 percent on similar investments. Pakistan was offering more than double.

The 2002 Power Policy reduced the return on equity to 12 to 13 percent. Some elements of competitive bidding were introduced. On the surface, this was an improvement. In substance, the dollar indexation was kept. The take-or-pay structure was kept. The capital cost pass-through was kept. The same regulator that had failed under the 1994 framework was kept in charge of approving 2002 tariffs. The 2020 inquiry would find that 2002-policy IPPs received excess payments, above what their contracts even legally allowed, of approximately Rs. 64.22 billion in just the nine years before 2020, with total excess over the remaining life of the contracts projected at Rs. 209.46 billion.

The CPEC contracts of 2014-2018, signed under the third Nawaz Sharif government, were significantly worse than 1994. They guaranteed Chinese state-owned enterprises returns on equity of 27 to 34 percent in dollars. By international comparison, this was extraordinary for a sovereign-guaranteed thermal power project.

This is the formula that produces your bill. Inflated capital cost, multiplied by a guaranteed dollar return, paid whether the plant runs or not, locked in for thirty years.

The working capital scam

There is one more piece, smaller in headline value but quietly worth billions per year. The 2020 inquiry called it the working capital scam.

When NEPRA, the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority, calculated the tariff, it assumed the IPPs were paid quarterly. So the tariff included compensation for two months of working capital each quarter, the cost the IPP would supposedly bear by waiting to be paid.

The actual payments, made by the Central Power Purchasing Agency, were monthly. So the IPPs never actually waited. The two extra months of working capital were paid for by the consumer, in the tariff, but never actually owed by the IPP.

The 2020 inquiry estimated this single technical error at billions of rupees of unjust profit per year, sustained over decades.

Read that line again. The regulator that was supposed to protect consumers built into the tariff a cost the IPPs were not actually incurring. And then the same regulator collected the tariff from consumers and passed it through to IPPs as if it were a real cost.

This was not a mistake that was caught and corrected. It was caught, by the 2020 inquiry, and then the inquiry itself was buried. The working capital arrangement continued.

NEPRA, the regulator that did not regulate

NEPRA was created in 1997, three years after the 1994 Power Policy, specifically to act as an independent regulator. Its job was to set tariffs, monitor IPPs, verify their costs, and protect consumer interests. On paper, NEPRA had extensive powers. In practice, it failed at every primary function for which it was created.

The 2020 Inquiry Report documented NEPRA's failures with specificity:

It approved tariff calculations using methodologies that allowed IPPs to systematically extract excess returns above their permitted return on equity.
It never adequately verified IPP claims about fuel consumption, operations costs, or maintenance expenses.
It accepted IPP submissions of capital cost without independent assessment, allowing inflated cost claims to be locked into tariff calculations.
It approved monthly debt servicing payments while assuming quarterly payments, the working capital scam described above.
It conducted public hearings on tariffs, but the proceedings were largely formalities. Substantive opposition rarely changed outcomes.

After the 2020 report became known, NEPRA's response was instructive. It claimed it had not been "consulted" on the report's findings about NEPRA's own conduct. This was technically accurate and substantively meaningless. The findings concerned NEPRA's historical decisions, which were already in NEPRA's own records. The regulator did not need a copy of the report to know what it had approved.

There was no internal review. No officials resigned. No tariffs were revised. The regulator continued doing exactly what it had been doing.

If any single fact captures the relationship between NEPRA's regulatory failures and personal interest, it is this. In February 2025, while ordinary Pakistanis were facing record electricity bills and 700,000 textile workers had lost their jobs, NEPRA's chairperson and members quietly approved increases to their own remuneration without obtaining the mandatory federal cabinet approval. The cumulative salary package of senior NEPRA officials was raised to approximately Rs. 2.95 to 3.25 million per month, higher than the salaries of judges of the superior courts. The story was reported by Dawn newspaper on 17 February 2025. NEPRA did not issue a meaningful response. No corrective action was announced. The salaries continued.

This is not a regulator acting in the public interest. This is a regulator serving its own interests, in violation of its own legal framework, while the consumers it was created to protect see their bills reach historic highs.

The 60 percent number

Here is the part that, when I first read it, made me put down the report and walk around my house for an hour.

If Pakistan eliminated capacity payments tomorrow, if all IPPs were converted to "take-and-pay" structures, where they are paid only for electricity actually produced and consumed, the average household electricity bill would fall by approximately 60 percent. From around Rs. 48 per unit to approximately Rs. 19 per unit.

Sixty percent.

This is not my estimate. It is the conclusion of the International Growth Centre's June 2025 work on the Pakistani power sector. It is consistent with the 2020 inquiry's recommendations and with multiple IEEFA reports.

Your bill of Rs. 50,000 a month would become Rs. 20,000. Your friend's textile factory could run again. The kiryana store owner could afford to keep his lights on through the evening. Your own savings would stop bleeding out every month into the bank accounts of forty families and a few foreign investors.

The single largest driver of unaffordable Pakistani electricity is not theft. It is not corruption in distribution. It is not fuel costs. It is contractual obligations to a small number of business families and Chinese state-owned enterprises.

All it would take is the cancellation of one contractual provision. The legal mechanism exists. The 2020 inquiry recommended it. International precedent supports it. Five domestic IPPs have already been terminated under the current government, and fourteen others have had their terms revised. The process is operational. It just has not been extended to all of them.

Why?

Because the same families who benefit from these contracts are also the families who run the country, fund the political parties, own the media, and sit on every committee that has been set up over the past thirty years to "review" the situation.

That is what stops the system from being fixed. Not law. Not arbitration risk. Not foreign pressure. Pakistani political will.

The Bangladesh comparison

If anyone tells you that Pakistan's electricity tariffs are high because that is just how energy works in developing countries, I have one comparison to offer.

In 2026, Pakistani industries are being charged Rs. 38 to 47 per unit. Bangladesh charges its industries Rs. 18. Vietnam charges Rs. 15. India charges Rs. 22.

Bangladesh did not have the 1994 Power Policy. Bangladesh did not sign CPEC contracts at twenty-seven to thirty-four percent dollar returns. Bangladesh provided its industry with cheap, reliable electricity.

In the year 2000, Pakistan and Bangladesh had roughly equivalent textile exports, around five billion dollars each. By 2024, Bangladesh exported $47 billion. Pakistan exported $16.5 billion. Bangladesh grew nine-fold. We grew three-fold. We were ahead. We are now far behind.

Naveed Ahmed, Chairman of the All Pakistan Textile Mills Association Southern Zone, put it precisely in February 2025:

"Pakistan's electricity tariffs for industrial use are nearly double those in countries like Bangladesh, Vietnam, and India. Industries can be run at twenty-six rupees per unit. We are being charged thirty-eight to forty rupees per unit. Why do industrial units have to foot the bill for line losses, capacity charges, and theft?"

That is the question. The answer, in two words, is capacity payments.

Why this is not just an economic problem

Capacity payments are usually discussed as a technical issue. Macroeconomic. Fiscal. The realm of finance ministers and IMF mission chiefs. I think this framing is misleading.

The capacity payment system is a moral problem first, an economic problem second.

Every rupee that leaves a household to pay an electricity bill is a rupee that was going to be spent on something else. After-school tuition for the children. Books and school supplies. Slightly better food, protein twice a week instead of once. New clothes for Eid. A small saving toward marriage expenses. An occasional doctor visit. Bus fares to visit family in the village. A new pair of shoes for the children.

When the electricity bill consumes Rs. 12,000, all of those things have to be cut. The tuition gets cancelled. The books are bought used. The protein twice a week becomes once a month. The Eid clothes are made from inexpensive fabric. The marriage saving is depleted. The doctor visit is delayed until the situation is serious. The bus fare is foregone. The shoes wait.

This is what is happening, right now, in tens of millions of Pakistani households, every month, to pay capacity charges to forty business families and twenty-one Chinese plants.

When you multiply this across the country, capacity payments stop being an abstract macroeconomic transfer. They become the temperature in your aging mother's bedroom on a hot August night when the air conditioner is off because the bill came in too high. They become the schoolbook your daughter could not get. They become the marriage saving your sister depleted. They become the migration of skilled young people to the Gulf because there is no work at home.

This is not collateral damage. This is the system functioning exactly as it was structured to function, transferring wealth, every month, from ordinary Pakistanis to a small number of well-connected groups, with civil servants serving as the technical machinery that makes it all look legal.

I do not believe most Pakistanis, if asked the question in those terms, would consent to this arrangement. The system continues because the question has not been asked in those terms. It has been hidden behind technical language about tariffs, circular debt, capacity factors, and dollar indexation. The technical language obscures the moral reality.

The moral reality is what I have just described.

What you can do, starting tonight

Most articles like this end by telling you what the government should do. I am going to end by telling you what you can do, because thirty years of waiting for the government to act has not produced reform.

1. Read your bill, line by line

The next time your bill arrives, do not just look at the total. Look at each line. Most Pakistani bills now show fixed charges, variable charges, fuel price adjustment, taxes, surcharges, and other components separately. The "fixed" component, plus a portion of what is loaded into the per-unit rate, is your share of capacity payments. It is the largest single number on the bill. Find it.

If you have ten minutes, calculate what your bill would be at Rs. 19 per unit instead of Rs. 48. That is approximately what you would be paying if capacity payments were eliminated. The difference between those two numbers is what the contracts cost your household every month.

2. Share what you now know

When friends or family complain about their bill, and they will, do not let the conversation stay at "the government is corrupt." Bring up capacity payments. Explain the taxi-driver analogy. Mention the Rs. 46 billion that HUBCO and KAPCO received in FY2023-24 for zero electricity. Mention the 60 percent number.

Specificity is powerful. Vague anger is not. The system has survived thirty years on vague anger.

3. Ask politicians the specific questions

The next time a politician, any politician, any party, asks for your vote, your endorsement, your donation, or your agreement, ask them this:

Will you publish the 2020 Power Sector Inquiry Report in full?
Will you conduct a forensic audit of all 1994 and 2002 policy IPPs?
Will you pursue legal recovery of the approximately Rs. 1 trillion in excess profits identified by the 2020 inquiry?
Will you raise CPEC IPP renegotiation directly with the Chinese government at the head-of-state level?
Will you reverse the 2026 Prosumer Regulations and restore fair pricing for solar households?

Make your support conditional on specific answers. Do not accept generalities. Do not accept "we will study this." Do not accept "after the next budget." If they refuse, withhold support. If they commit and then break their commitment, withhold support next time. The only thing politicians ultimately fear is loss of political support.

4. If you have solar, keep it. If you do not, look into it carefully.

The 2026 rules have made solar economics worse than they were in 2024, but for most Pakistani households solar still makes sense, particularly hybrid systems that reduce grid dependence rather than maximise feed-in. Existing net-metering agreements are largely grandfathered. Do not abandon what you have. If you are deciding whether to install, the math has changed but the answer for many households is still yes. I will write about that in detail in a separate post.

5. Treat this as collective, not personal

The most painful conclusion in all my research is this: there is no individual escape from the capacity-payment system. The contracts are structured so that whatever route you take, going solar, going off-grid, reducing consumption, moving your business to KPK or Balochistan, the obligations of the IPPs find a way to reach you.

The only real escape is structural. Termination or restructuring of the contracts. Forensic recovery of excess profits. Operationalisation of competitive markets. None of these can be done by an individual citizen. All of them require collective political action.

That means voting based on energy policy positions, not on tribal loyalties. It means pressing politicians for specific commitments. It means supporting journalism, civil society, and information-sharing about this issue. It means refusing to accept partisan distractions from the substantive question.

If we treat the IPP question as a personal financial problem, we lose. The system is too well-engineered for individual escape. If we treat it as a political problem requiring collective action, we have a chance. The system can be changed. It just cannot be changed one citizen at a time.

In closing

Capacity payments are the most important number in Pakistani public life that almost no Pakistani knows about. They cost us roughly two trillion rupees a year. They have cost us, cumulatively, about twelve trillion rupees over the past decade. They have hollowed out our textile industry, doubled our household electricity bills, and built one of the world's fastest-growing rooftop solar markets out of pure economic desperation.

They are not a natural fact. They are not an act of God. They are a contractual provision, written into specific documents in 1994, expanded in 2002, expanded again in 2014, and protected by every government since.

What was written can be rewritten. What was contracted can be renegotiated. The legal mechanisms exist. The international precedent exists. The financial savings, Rs. 1.5 to 2 trillion per year, by the 2020 inquiry's estimate, would fund every social program Pakistan has been told it cannot afford.

What is missing is not technical capacity. It is political will, public understanding, and citizen pressure organised consistently across electoral cycles.

Public understanding is the part you and I can change tonight.

Thank you for reading. Forward this article to ten people. Discuss it at your dinner table. Bring it up at family gatherings. The goal is not to convert anyone to a single political position. The goal is to make the basic facts of the system common knowledge, so that when the next government promises "historic tariff reductions," you will know how to evaluate the claim, and so that politicians who lie about your bill begin to lose elections.

That is, in the end, the only protection a citizen ever has. Information, properly held, cannot be taken away. It cannot be voted out of office. It can only be shared.

Share it.

WHAT THIS MEANS IN PRACTICE

Tonight, find the fixed-charge line on your latest electricity bill. Calculate what your bill would be at Rs. 19 per unit. The difference is roughly what the IPP contracts cost your household every month, money the contracts route to forty business families and twenty-one Chinese plants for the privilege of having their power plants exist.

, Asad Baig, Lahore, April 2026

Frequently asked questions

What is a capacity payment in simple words? A capacity payment is money paid to a power plant owner whether or not the plant produces any electricity. In Pakistan, it makes up roughly 40 percent of every electricity bill. Plants are paid for their existence, not for their output.

Why are electricity bills so high in Pakistan in 2026? The single largest driver is capacity payments to independent power producers (IPPs). Approximately 40 percent of every rupee on a Pakistani bill goes to capacity payments, for the contractual right of plants to exist, regardless of whether they produce. The next largest components are fuel (~25%), distribution losses including theft (~20%), and taxes and operations (~15%).

How much do capacity payments cost Pakistan per year? Approximately Rs. 2 trillion per year as of FY2025, according to the IEEFA, the 2020 Power Sector Inquiry Report, and multiple International Growth Centre analyses. That figure is more than Pakistan's annual defence budget.

What is take-or-pay? A take-or-pay contract is one in which the buyer must take the goods or pay for them anyway. In Pakistan's IPP context, the government must take the electricity the plant produces, or pay the capacity charge if the plant does not produce. The plant is paid in either case.

Is the government doing anything about this? The current PML-N government, since October 2024, has terminated five domestic IPPs and renegotiated terms on fourteen others. Estimated annual savings: about Rs. 60 billion. Meaningful, but modest, compared to the trillion-rupee scale of the problem. The 2020 Inquiry Report, the forensic audit it recommended, and CPEC IPP renegotiation have not been pursued.

If capacity payments were eliminated, how much would my bill fall? By approximately 60 percent. From around Rs. 48 per unit to approximately Rs. 19 per unit, according to the International Growth Centre (June 2025). A household paying Rs. 50,000 a month would pay roughly Rs. 20,000.

Who are the 40 families that own Pakistan's IPPs? Approximately 40 Pakistani business families control most privately owned IPPs in the country, including the Mansha (Nishat) group, the Dawood / Engro group, and the Sharif family among others. A separate sourced explainer is at The 40 Families Who Own Pakistan's IPPs.

Sources and notes

Every claim in this article is drawn from publicly available material. Primary sources include:

Power Sector Inquiry Report 2020, Government of Pakistan, committee headed by Muhammad Ali, former SECP Chairman (ARY News mirror)
NEPRA State of Industry Reports 2015-2024, National Electric Power Regulatory Authority
CPPA-G Annual Reports, Central Power Purchasing Agency Guarantee Limited
IEEFA Reports on Pakistan Power Sector by Haneea Isaad, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (2024-2025)
International Growth Centre, Sustainable Pakistan Growth Brief (June 2025)
Dawn, "Top NEPRA officials hike salaries without cabinet nod" (17 February 2025)
Dawn, "Most of IPPs owned by 40 Pakistani families, groups" (22 July 2024)
Gohar Ejaz public data release on IPP payments, July 2024
Express Tribune, "187 mills shut down in Punjab" (14 February 2025)
APTMA (All Pakistan Textile Mills Association) public statements 2023-2025
Naveed Ahmed (APTMA Southern Zone Chairman), public remarks, February 2025

Capacity Payments in Pakistan: Why Your Electricity Bill Is So High in 2026

Capacity Payments in Pakistan: Why Your Electricity Bill Is So High in 2026

A plain-English guide to the 40 percent of your bill nobody explains

The bill arrives

What is in your electricity bill

What is a capacity payment, in plain English

The Rs. 46 billion that bought zero electricity