Is a solar battery worth it in Pakistan? Do this calculation first

Since net billing arrived in February 2026, batteries have been sold harder in Pakistan than at any point I can remember. The pitch is clean: exported units now earn roughly a third of the old rate, so rather than exporting, store the unit and use it in the evening at your full retail tariff. The gap between those two numbers is your return.

It sounds airtight because it leaves out the only number that decides it — what the storage costs you per unit it actually delivers over its life.

The calculation, in four steps

1. Take the nameplate capacity of the bank in kilowatt-hours, and multiply by the realistic depth of discharge — not 100%. This gives usable capacity per cycle.
2. Multiply usable capacity by the manufacturer rated cycle count at that depth of discharge. This is the total energy the bank will deliver over its life.
3. Divide the fully installed cost — cells, any additional inverter capability, wiring, enclosure, installation — by that total energy. You now have a cost per usable kilowatt-hour.
4. Compare that figure against the spread you are trying to capture: your retail tariff minus the buyback rate.

If the cost per usable kilowatt-hour is at or above the spread, the battery does not pay for itself on arbitrage. It does not lose you money dramatically — it just quietly fails to earn its cost, which is a much harder failure to notice than an outright loss.

When the answer flips to yes

There is a strong case for storage in Pakistan. It is simply not the arbitrage case.

• An outage costs you real money. A cold store losing stock, a process that cannot be safely interrupted, a clinic. Here the comparison is not against a tariff spread but against the cost of the thing going wrong — and one bad outage can exceed the cost of the bank.
• You are currently running a diesel generator through outages. The battery then displaces fuel rather than a marginally cheaper grid unit, which is a completely different and much stronger calculation. Work out your monthly generator running cost first; it is usually the most useful number in the conversation.
• A genuinely large evening load that cannot be moved into daylight by any reasonable operational change. Note the qualifier — most evening load can move further than people assume.

The free option people skip

Before buying storage, work out how much load you can shift into daylight for nothing. Water heating, pool pumps, laundry, pre-cooling a building before the evening, running a batch process earlier in the day. Every unit you move into generation hours is a unit you did not have to store, at zero capital cost and with no cycle life to worry about.

On a lot of sites this eliminates most of the case for a battery. It is also the recommendation nobody selling batteries will make to you.

If you do buy, buy LiFePO4

Lead-acid still appears in cheap quotations and should not. Under solar cycling duty in Pakistani ambient temperatures it reaches end of life far sooner than its headline price suggests — run the same four-step calculation on it and the cost per usable kilowatt-hour is usually worse than LiFePO4 despite the lower purchase price. Where I specify storage it is LiFePO4, from Dyness or Pylontech.

One more thing worth knowing before you commit: storage is an inverter decision. If there is any prospect of a battery, the inverter must be specified for it at design stage — which is why sizing storage against a real reliability case starts before the array is designed rather than after. Retrofitting onto an inverter never chosen for storage means replacing it or adding a second conversion stage, and both cost more than getting it right at the start.