Hadron Solar built its business on net metering, and the rule that paid for it has changed
The Lahore installer says it has put in more than 20 MW and has announced no equity round. In February 2026 the regulator cut the price the grid pays for exported power by more than half.
An installer's average job shows who its customers are. Hadron Solar of Lahore says it has put in more than 20 MW across more than 900 installations, which works out at about 22 kilowatts a job. Pakistan's net metered connections average about 15 kilowatts (7,000 MW across 466,000 consumers), so Hadron's typical job is roughly half as large again as the national one. It points to big residential roofs, shops, schools and farms that sell their surplus power to the grid, and those are the customers most exposed to what the regulator did on 9 February 2026: it cut the price paid for exported power from about Rs26 a unit to about Rs11.
A contractor that became a supplier
Hadron has operated since 2014 and was previously called Solar Tech Intl. The Private Financing Advisory Network, a clean energy programme that coaches small firms for investors, says the company started in engineering, procurement and construction work and later began supplying panels, inverters and cables directly to local installers. Its customers include farms, homes and companies. The company lists more than 120 full time staff in nine cities and offices in four.
Waqas Moosa, the chief executive, told Corporate Knights that Hadron mainly sells directly to households, businesses and farms, and has only recently begun selling components to smaller installers. Moosa also chairs the Pakistan Solar Association, whose members he describes as mostly mid sized to large importers and distributors. One of Hadron's earlier jobs, a power purchase agreement for a mall in Faisalabad, was among Pakistan's first commercial deals of that kind, according to Moosa.
The network's profile of Hadron records turnover of $1.65 million in the 2020 to 2021 financial year, with positive gross margins, and $180,000 raised with the network's help. It adds that Hadron secured debt funding, without giving the amount or the lender. No equity round has been announced, which makes Hadron an unusual startup story: a company that has grown on its own earnings and debt rather than on venture capital.
“We've almost doubled our business every two to three years. It's been very fast growth.”
Doubling every two to three years is annual growth of 26 to 41 percent (the cube root and the square root of two, minus one).
What a roof costs
Hadron's website lists five residential hybrid packages, each combining panels, an inverter and a battery, with prices in rupees. The entry package, Basic Home, costs Rs355,000 for 1.75 kW of panels, a 2.5 kW inverter and a 1.7 kWh tubular battery. The largest costs Rs2,250,000 for 15.21 kW of panels, a 15 kW inverter and a 4.8 kWh lithium ion battery.
Two of the packages carry the same 4.8 kWh lithium battery, so the gap between them isolates the cost of scale. The 5.85 kW system with a 6 kW inverter costs Rs1,285,000. The 15.21 kW system costs Rs965,000 more and adds 9.36 kW of panels and 9 kW of inverter, which is about Rs103,000 for each added kilowatt of array (965,000 divided by 9.36). If cost rises in a straight line, Rs603,000 of the smaller system's price is panels and inverter (5.85 times 103,000), and the other Rs682,000, or 53 percent, is the battery, mounting, wiring, labour and margin that do not grow with the array. The price per kilowatt of panels falls from about Rs220,000 for the smaller system to about Rs148,000 for the larger one.
Panels have become the cheap part. Renewables First, a research group, found the average price of a panel fell from 32 cents a watt to 17 cents in 2024. When panels cost that little and hundreds of importers sell them, a seller that only resells them competes on price with everyone. Hadron points to other things: designing the system, financing it, batteries, and aftersales. It says it was among the first companies enlisted with several banks under the State Bank's long term refinance scheme, which lets buyers pay in instalments. It also says it built its own tool to monitor inverters and batteries and runs a support centre open all day. Those are the parts an importer cannot copy by cutting price.
What net billing changes
The National Electric Power Regulatory Authority notified its Prosumer Regulations on 9 February 2026. They replace net metering, in which each exported unit offsets an imported one, with net billing, in which exports are sold at a separate price: about Rs11 a unit for new users, against about Rs26 before, a fall of 58 percent. New contracts run for five years instead of seven. Utilities may refuse new connections once solar on a distribution transformer reaches 80 percent of its rated capacity. Applications filed up to 8 February were allowed to proceed under the old rules, which covered more than 5,000 applicants.
The size of the cut matters because of the gap with the import price. Grid units cost Rs37 to Rs55 depending on the slab, before taxes. An exported unit is now worth 20 to 30 percent of an imported one (11 divided by 55, and 11 divided by 37), so a unit a household uses itself is worth three to five times a unit it sends out.
A battery turns midday exports into evening use, so its value is the import price minus the export price for each unit it shifts. Under the old rules that gain was Rs11 to Rs29 a unit (37 minus 26, and 55 minus 26). Under net billing it is Rs26 to Rs44 (37 minus 11, and 55 minus 11). A 4.8 kWh battery cycled once a day therefore earns Rs125 to Rs211 a day, or Rs46,000 to Rs77,000 a year before losses, where it earned Rs53 to Rs139 a day, or Rs19,000 to Rs51,000 a year, before the change. Hadron does not publish a price for a battery on its own, so a payback cannot be worked out from its list, but the direction is plain: the rule change makes batteries worth more and exports worth less.
Moosa saw it coming. In a February 2025 interview on the Volts podcast he said 40 to 50 percent of residential customers were considering or had added batteries, and that he expected 80 to 90 percent of home systems to include one within about a year, especially if net metering rules changed. In October 2026 he told Flare magazine that commercial demand had been strongly affected by the move to net billing, and that the reversal of net metering "has also accelerated interest in batteries and BESS as costs become more affordable".
Who gains and who loses
Hadron says it has secured more than 650 net metering licences for customers, equal to 72 percent of its 900 installations. Contracts signed under the old rules stay valid until they expire, so that installed base is protected, but every future sale falls under net billing. The company also reports a further 12 MW in its pipeline, equal to 60 percent of the 20 MW it has installed in its decade of trading.
Sellers of panels alone lose most, because the export income that justified an oversized array has gone. Households and firms that size a system to their own consumption, and add a battery, lose least. Installers with design skill, finance and service gain, because they can sell the larger, costlier package that self consumption now requires. Hadron is trying to be that kind of company, but it has not shown that it earns more from one.
It has not said what it earns now. The last published turnover is for the 2020 to 2021 financial year, and no margin, debt or profit figure has come since. Neither the financing partners nor the lenders behind its debt are named. The first five year net billing contracts, signed from 9 February 2026, expire from February 2031.
