SkyElectric sells batteries, but 58 percent of its customers' solar power went to the grid

More than half of the electricity that SkyElectric's solar panels have generated for its customers never went into a battery or a house. It went to the grid. The company's homepage counters give 342 gigawatt hours produced, 200 gigawatt hours exported and 142 gigawatt hours used on site. That is 58 percent exported and 42 percent used by the customer, from a company whose pitch is storage.

The same counters show 36.5 gigawatt hours moving from batteries to loads. Set against the 142 gigawatt hours used on site, batteries supplied about 26 percent of self consumption. Set against everything the panels made, they handled about 11 percent, or roughly one unit in nine. The company does not say over what period the counters have run, and the figures are its own, so they cannot be turned into a yearly number. They still show where most of the energy went: out of the building.

The physics explains much of the pattern. Panels produce most of their energy around midday, while a household's heaviest load usually falls in the evening. Without storage, whatever the house is not using at noon has nowhere to go but the grid. A battery moves that surplus to the hours when it is needed. The counters suggest that, across the installed base, the battery has so far moved a small share of it.

What an exported unit is now worth

Under the old net metering arrangement, exports and imports were swapped unit for unit. On 9 February the National Electric Power Regulatory Authority notified net billing rules, which treat the two flows separately. Dawn reported that surplus power is valued at Rs26 a unit for existing customers and about Rs11 a unit for future ones, while units drawn from the distribution company are billed at Rs37 to Rs55 depending on the slab, before taxes. Existing customers move to net billing immediately, with exports credited for one month instead of three. Their seven year contracts otherwise stand until they expire. New contracts run five years.

Apply those prices to the 200 gigawatt hours and the stakes become visible. At Rs26 a unit, that energy is worth Rs5.2 billion. At Rs11 it is worth Rs2.2 billion, Rs3 billion less. This is an illustration, because the counters span an unknown period and customers signed at different times, and existing customers keep the Rs26 rate. Its use is to show how much of the installed base's value sits in exports, and why a new buyer faces a different calculation from the 10,000 who came before.

The arithmetic of a battery

A battery gives a household a way to avoid exporting at the low price. A unit stored at midday and used in the evening replaces a unit that would have been bought at Rs37 to Rs55, and it gives up an export worth Rs11. Lithium iron phosphate cells typically return about 90 percent of the energy put in, so each stored unit delivers 0.9 of a unit. That makes the gain about Rs22 to Rs38 for each unit shifted, after the lost export income. One full cycle a day for a year, 365 cycles, comes to roughly Rs8,100 to Rs14,000 for each kilowatt hour of battery capacity.

That range is the magazine's calculation from published tariffs and a general efficiency figure, not a company claim. A buyer would set it against the price of the battery, which SkyElectric does not publish. A battery that cycles less than once a day, or a household whose consumption sits in a cheaper slab, earns proportionally less. The slab matters: the reported import range is wide, and the top of it applies only to heavy users. The figure scales with size. A 10 kilowatt hour battery cycled daily would be worth Rs81,000 to Rs140,000 a year on the same assumptions.

A solar and battery bundle with its own software

SkyElectric sells a rooftop system that combines panels, a battery and an inverter, linked to its cloud software. The company's executive chairman is Ashar Aziz. Dawn's Aurora magazine reported in 2019 that it had started operating in Pakistan in 2017, had its own assembly line, and drew the largest share of revenue from households. It described software that uses grid tariff data to charge the battery in cheaper periods.

The company's website now claims more than 10,000 customers and systems from 3 kilowatts to 10 megawatts. It lists more than 250 installers, 180 of them residential, 55 commercial and 15 industrial, and offices in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Karachi and Coral Gables, Florida. The residential range includes SkyHome, a 10 or 20 kilowatt hybrid system with a lithium iron phosphate battery and a 10 year warranty, and SkyValue, an all in one inverter and battery unit in 6, 8 and 12 kilowatt sizes. In February 2026, at an event marking ten years, it launched SkyElectric X, which it presents as a move from solar products to a wider energy platform.

Commercial contracts

Larger customers now sit beside the households. In November 2023 SkyElectric finished a 1 megawatt solar plant at the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute in Swabi, which the institute's rector said took less than three months. On 18 September 2025 it signed a 10 megawatt agreement with Saif Textile Mills to make the Kohat mill fully solar powered. The value was not disclosed.

A mill runs through the day, so it can use more of its own output and export less, which is the opposite of the pattern the homepage totals show for the whole base. The company does not break its counters down by customer type, so how far commercial systems pull the self consumption share up is unknown.

What is not known

SkyElectric is privately held. None of the sources reviewed gives its revenue, profit or funding, or names its investors. The period behind the energy counters is missing, and so is any price for SkyHome or SkyValue.

That last gap decides the question the battery arithmetic raises. Until SkyElectric publishes what a kilowatt hour of its storage costs, the Rs8,100 to Rs14,000 a year cannot be turned into a payback period.