Energy audit — the work that happens before you spend

Almost every solar quotation in Pakistan is produced without anyone having measured the site. A salesman looks at a roof, asks roughly what the bill is, and returns a kilowatt figure. That figure is a guess, and under net billing a guess is now considerably more expensive than it used to be.

An energy audit replaces the guess. It establishes what your site consumes, when it consumes it, and what proportion of that falls inside the hours an array can serve at full value. Everything downstream — capacity, inverter selection, whether storage is justified, what payback is realistic — depends on those numbers.

The only number that decides your system size

Since February 2026, a unit you consume as you generate it is worth your full tariff, and a unit you export is worth roughly a third of the old buyback rate. Those are two different products. The audit exists to work out how many of the first kind you can actually use.

This is why a bill total is insufficient. Two factories with identical annual consumption — one on a single day shift, one running around the clock — need very different systems, and a quotation built from the annual figure will be wrong for at least one of them.

The units it is cheaper not to use

A meaningful share of industrial audits in Pakistan turn up savings that have nothing to do with solar, and I report them even though there is no fee in it for me.

• Power factor penalties — often several percent of a bill, and correctable with capacitors at a fraction of the cost of generating the equivalent.
• Motors running unloaded or grossly oversized for their duty. A motor at 30% load is an expensive way to do nothing.
• Compressed air leaks. On plants with reciprocating compressors this is routinely one of the largest single wastages on site and almost nobody measures it.
• Tariff slab and connection category. Occasionally a site is simply on the wrong tariff for its consumption pattern.
• Lighting still on discharge or halogen fittings in a plant that runs two shifts.

On some sites the first tranche of money is better spent here than on an array. Saying so costs me a solar project and is the entire reason the audit is worth commissioning from someone with no margin on equipment.

The charge on your bill that solar may not touch

Industrial and larger commercial bills frequently carry a maximum-demand or sanctioned-load charge separate from the units consumed. It is billed on the highest demand you hit in the period, and it can be a substantial share of what you pay.

Solar reduces the units. Whether it reduces the demand charge depends entirely on when your peak occurs. If your maximum demand is set by a motor starting at seven in the morning, or by a night shift, an array will not touch it — and a payback calculation that quietly assumed the whole bill would fall is wrong by however much that charge is.

This is one of the more common ways an otherwise reasonable projection turns out optimistic, and it is only visible if someone has read the bill properly rather than taking the total. Where the peak is set by a startable load, the remedy is sometimes staggering the start sequence rather than generating anything at all.

What you receive

A written report with your load profile, the daytime consumption figure the sizing rests on, the efficiency findings, and a recommended capacity range with the reasoning shown rather than asserted. If the recommendation is that solar does not justify itself on your site, that is what the report says — and you can take it to anyone else for a second opinion, which is exactly what a document worth paying for should allow.