Hashim Textile · Lahore
177 kW- PANELS
- 288 × Longi 615W N-Type Bifacial
- INVERTERS
- 1 × Huawei SUN2000-115KTL 115 kW
- COMMISSIONED
- —
- MY FEE
- 4%, on commissioning
The EPC+ model
I merged the consultant and the contractor into one accountable party
Pakistan's solar market gives you two ways to buy a plant. Hire a consultant to design it and a contractor to build it, and spend the project watching them blame each other. Or hand it to one contractor who prices the equipment at whatever the market bears and never shows you what it cost.
I do the third thing. The design, the procurement and the execution are one accountable engineer — but the procurement is open, and I earn 4% of project cost rather than a margin on your hardware. Internationally this structure is called EPC+.
What it costs
Two delivered projects, against what the same scope is quoted at
Divide your own quotation by your capacity in watts and you can compare it with these directly. That is the only claim on this page you can check before speaking to anyone.
Delivered cost per watt
Fee included, against what the same scope is quoted at
Hashim Textile, Lahore · 177 kW
56 PKR/W
PKR 9,947,059 all in, including the 4% fee. Saved the client PKR 2.5–3M against the conventional route.
Hassan Flour Mill, DG Khan · 500 kW
61 PKR/W
Inclusive of design consultancy at 4%, on a site that needed its row spacing optimised to fit the capacity.
YTECH SOLAR, delivered Conventional route · 62–72 PKR/W
Delivered figures are from each project's own cost document, fee included. The comparison range is YTECH SOLAR's own record of quotes seen in the market — a practitioner's observation of prevailing pricing, not an audited survey. Last verified 2026-08-11. Cost per watt moves with capacity, module choice and site access; these are delivered outcomes, not a price list.
The three routes
Consultant, contractor, or both at once
Each of these is a legitimate way to buy a solar plant, and each has a real failure mode. Here are all three, including mine, with what is wrong with it.
- Consultant
Consultant only
Earns by A design fee, paid whether or not anything gets built well.
Strengths
- Independent technical judgement, with no hardware to sell you
- Proper drawings, load analysis and compliance documentation
What is wrong with it
- No control over what the contractor actually installs
- When something fails, the consultant blames the contractor and the contractor blames the design
- You pay twice — once for the design, once for the build — and coordinate both yourself
- Contractor
Contractor / turnkey EPC
Earns by The margin between what the equipment costs and what you pay.
Strengths
- One party to call, one contract, one schedule
- Fast, and genuinely capable of executing at scale
What is wrong with it
- The equipment margin is inside a bundled price you cannot see
- Specification tends to follow what is in stock or what carries the best supplier commission
- Documentation and compliance are cost lines, so they are the first thing trimmed
- EPC+ This practice
EPC + Consultancy
Earns by A stated percentage of project cost, and nothing on the hardware.
Strengths
- One accountable engineer designs it, procures it and commissions it
- Equipment at original supplier invoice — the margin is not there to hide
- Compliance documentation is the deliverable, not an overhead
- The fee falls due on commissioning, so an unbuilt system earns nothing
What is wrong with it
- A percentage fee means the fee rises with project cost — the counterweight is that a smaller system is easier to justify when there is no hardware margin to protect
- One practice has finite capacity; large concurrent programmes are not what this is built for
Scope
What the 4% covers
Everything below is inside the fee. There is no second invoice for design, supervision, commissioning or after-sales.
- Design and documentation
- Complete system design, single-line diagrams, load analysis and IEEE/AEDB-compliant drawings. The documentation set is a deliverable you keep, not an internal working file — it is what lets any other engineer audit the system later.
- Procurement at original invoice
- Equipment is bought at the lowest price the market will give, from suppliers built up over years, and invoiced to you in the supplier's own name. Nothing is marked up and no supplier commission is taken.
- Consultancy at 4%
- A stated four percent of total project cost — the entire compensation for the technical work. There is no second revenue line anywhere in the arrangement.
- In-house execution
- Installation teams working under direct engineering supervision, rather than a subcontract handed to whoever bid lowest. This is what removes the consultant-versus-contractor blame gap.
- Turnkey delivery
- Design, installation, testing, commissioning and after-sales under one accountable engineer. You have one number to call at every stage, including three years after handover.
- Reporting and monitoring
- Progress tracking and generation reporting, with the analysis tooling doing the clerical work so the engineering time goes into the engineering. The Simta Foods generation record published on this site is what that output looks like.
Worked example
177 kW at Hashim Textile, Lahore
Equipment invoiced at PKR 9,564,480. Consultancy at 4% — PKR 382,579. Total PKR 9,947,059, which is PKR 56 a watt with the fee inside it. The same scope bought through a contractor runs PKR 62–72 a watt.
The mill also needed capacity from a roof that did not obviously have room for it. Higher-wattage modules got the system to 177 kW and lowered the total cost by over PKR 1.5M against the alternative design — fewer, better panels need less structure, less cable and less labour than more cheap ones.
Questions
What people ask about the model
Including the one about whether a percentage fee is really an incentive to keep costs down.
What does EPC+ actually mean?
EPC stands for engineering, procurement and construction — a contractor who delivers a plant turnkey. EPC+ adds the consultancy layer: the same party also carries the independent design and compliance role, but is paid a stated fee rather than a hardware margin. The structure is used internationally in construction, renewables and infrastructure. What makes it unusual in Pakistan's solar market is the transparency it requires: it only works if the client sees the original equipment invoices.
Why is a consultancy fee cheaper than a contractor's price?
Because it replaces a margin rather than adding to one. A contractor earns on the spread between wholesale and your price, and that spread is invisible and unbounded. A 4% fee on project cost is visible and bounded. On the two projects where both numbers are documented, delivered cost came to PKR 56 and PKR 61 per watt including the fee, against a conventional market range of PKR 62–72 per watt.
If you take no margin on equipment, what stops you overspending?
Nothing structural, which is a fair objection to raise — a percentage fee does rise with project cost. Three things work against it. You see every original supplier invoice, so overspending is visible rather than hidden. The fee is 4%, so adding a million rupees of unnecessary hardware earns forty thousand and costs the client a million. And the fee is only due once the system is commissioned and generating, so an over-specified system that underperforms is a problem the engineer keeps.
Do you handle IEEE and AEDB compliance?
Yes — design, documentation and drawings are produced to IEEE and AEDB requirements, and the compliance set is handed over as part of the project rather than treated as paperwork. Anti-islanding is verified to IEC 62116 at commissioning and the test result goes into the handover pack.
Who actually does the installation?
In-house teams working under direct engineering supervision, not an external contractor bidding on the job. That is the specific structural change this model makes: in the conventional arrangement the person who designed the system and the person who installed it work for different companies with different incentives, and the gap between them is where most defects live.
Is this only for large industrial projects?
No, but the economics are strongest above roughly 100 kW. Industrial and commercial work is taken across Pakistan. Domestic work is concentrated in Lahore, because after-sales here means personally taking the call, and that is a promise that only holds within driving distance.
Send me your sanctioned load and your last few bills
That is enough to tell you whether this is worth doing on your site, and what it would cost per watt — before either of us spends a day on it.