Work out your numbers
Will a battery actually pay for itself?
Often not, and this page will tell you when. A battery generates nothing — it moves units you would have exported into hours you would have imported, and earns the difference. Whether that repays LiFePO4 storage inside its service life depends entirely on your load.
I sell no batteries and take no margin on the ones I specify, so there is nothing in it for me either way. Where storage is right, it is right for outage cover as often as for economics — and those are different purchases that deserve different tests.
Battery payback calculator
Your site
Every figure below is yours to change
Storage
Usable capacity, LiFePO4
Starting position
No battery, unless you can name why
For most grid-connected sites in Pakistan the honest default is no storage. The array pays for itself quickly; the battery is usually what stops a project working financially. Pick a pack size on the left and I will show you the arithmetic on your own load profile — including when it says no.
When storage genuinely is right
An outage costs you money
A cold store, an ice plant, or any process where losing power spoils stock. Here the battery is insurance, and it is judged against what a lost batch costs — not against payback.
Your evening load is large and your daytime load is not
A house empty until dusk exports most of what it generates at a third of its value. Storage moves those units into the hours you actually use them, and that gap is what it earns.
Load-shedding is long and routine where you are
If you are already running a generator through it, the comparison is against diesel per unit rather than against grid tariff — and storage often wins that one comfortably.
You are buying the inverter anyway
Specifying a hybrid inverter now costs a little more than a string inverter and leaves storage open for later, when packs will be cheaper. That is usually the right sequence.
If none of those describe your site, the array alone is very likely the better project — and the system sizing calculator will cost it for you.
What this calculation rests on
Every figure, dated and sourced — check them
- Net billing buyback
- PKR 11/unit exported
- NEPRA Prosumer Regulations 2026, net billing buyback rate · last verified 5 Aug 2026
- Residential tariff
- PKR 58/unit, unprotected, all-in
- NEPRA consumer-end tariff schedule, unprotected residential slabs · last verified 5 Aug 2026
- Industrial tariff
- PKR 52/unit, all-in
- NEPRA consumer-end tariff schedule, B-1/B-2 industrial · last verified 5 Aug 2026
- Installed cost
- PKR 120–150/watt, wholesale
- YTECH SOLAR procurement records, wholesale, no margin · last verified 5 Aug 2026
- Battery cost
- PKR 38,000/usable kWh, LiFePO4
- YTECH SOLAR procurement records — Dyness/Pylontech LiFePO4, wholesale · last verified 5 Aug 2026
- Specific yield
- 1,520 kWh/kWp/year in Lahore
- Global Solar Atlas long-term averages, checked against delivered plant data · last verified 5 Aug 2026
These are reference figures, not a quotation. The calculator cannot see your roof orientation, your shading, your existing switchgear, your sanctioned load or the condition of your connection — and any one of those can move the answer materially. What it gives you is a defensible starting point and the arithmetic behind it.
Tariffs and the buyback rate move. Anything dated more than a few months ago should be re-checked against your own bill before you spend money on it — and net billing changed the arithmetic in February 2026, so figures from before then do not apply at all.
Questions about batteries and storage
- Is a solar battery worth it in Pakistan?
- Usually not on economics alone, and often yes on outage cover — and those are different purchases that deserve to be judged differently. A battery generates nothing. All it does is move units you would have exported into hours when you would have imported, and it earns the difference between the retail tariff and the buyback rate on each one. On most domestic load profiles that difference does not repay LiFePO4 storage within its service life. Where an outage genuinely costs you money — a cold store, an ice plant, a process that spoils — the calculation is completely different and storage is often correct.
- How is battery payback actually calculated?
- Take the units the battery moves from export to self-consumption in a year, multiply by the gap between your tariff and the buyback rate, and divide the battery cost by that. The trap is the first figure. A battery can only cycle its usable capacity roughly once a day, only on days there is surplus to store, and only up to what your evening load can absorb — this calculator applies all three ceilings, and rates the pack at 340 cycles a year rather than 365. Quoting 365 full cycles is the standard way battery payback gets overstated.
- How many batteries do I need for my house?
- Size it against the load you actually need to carry through the evening, not against your system size. Work out the units you consume between sunset and midnight — usually lights, fans, a fridge and one or two air conditioners — and size the usable capacity to that. For most Lahore homes that is somewhere between 5 and 15 kWh. Sizing storage as a percentage of array capacity is a habit from off-grid design and it routinely produces packs twice the size the site can cycle.
- What kind of battery should I use for solar in Pakistan?
- LiFePO4, from an established manufacturer such as Dyness or Pylontech, and nothing else. Lead-acid is cheaper per nameplate kilowatt-hour and roughly three times more expensive per kilowatt-hour actually delivered over its life, because of shallow usable depth of discharge and short cycle life in Pakistani ambient temperatures. This calculator does not model lead-acid at all, because I do not specify it.
- How long does a solar battery last?
- Ten to fifteen years for a quality LiFePO4 pack cycled reasonably, typically warranted at around 6,000 cycles to 70 or 80% of original capacity. That service life is the number to test any payback claim against: if the storage recovers its cost in fourteen years and the warranty runs out at ten, it does not pay back, whatever the arithmetic before that point suggests.
- Will a battery let me go off-grid completely?
- Technically yes and economically almost never, in a city with a grid connection. Going fully off-grid means sizing both array and storage for the worst week of the year — an overcast stretch in late December — which means paying for capacity that sits idle for the other fifty weeks. A grid connection is the cheapest backup you will ever own. Off-grid is the right answer where there is no connection to have, which in practice means remote tubewells and sites the network does not reach.
- Should I buy a battery now or add it later?
- Later is usually right, provided the inverter is chosen with that in mind. Battery prices have fallen consistently and a pack bought in three years will be cheaper and better than one bought today, whereas the array should go in now because it starts saving immediately. The one thing worth deciding upfront is the inverter: specifying a hybrid unit at the outset costs a little more than a string inverter and leaves the storage option open, where a plain string inverter closes it.