Pakistan's rooftop solar boom has been widely reported at "7,000 megawatts" of installed capacity. That figure traces back to a single official estimate, given by a Power Division energy adviser at a SAARC webinar, not an independently audited count.

The genuine surprise: a separate Pakistani government-linked study found the opposite problem to what's usually assumed. Rather than the figure being inflated, Pakistan's own regulators appear to be under-counting real solar capacity, because unlicensed, unmetered rooftop installations are invisible to grid planners. One modelling estimate puts real distributed solar capacity as high as double the official figure, roughly 38 gigawatts.

Evidence for this: in areas modelled with realistic solar penetration, local transformer loading jumped from an expected 34% to an actual 76%, solar demand nobody had accounted for.

The bottom line: the honest answer here is that nobody, including Pakistan's own government, has a reliable number for how much rooftop solar the country actually has. "7,000 MW" is a defensible floor, not a verified ceiling.