Arab News reported in late August 2026 that the Power Division had told distribution companies and PITC to clear rooftop solar connections that were already in motion before the net-billing cutoff. The directive covers applicants who, before 9 February 2026, had paid demand notices, received licences, had meters changed and executed connection orders. Those consumers did everything the old system asked of them and then found their files frozen when the rules changed.
The legal backdrop is NEPRA's Prosumer Regulations, 2026, notified as S.R.O. 251(I)/2026 on 9 February. They repealed the 2015 net-metering regulations and moved new prosumers to net billing: imports are charged at the applicable tariff and exports are credited at the national average energy purchase price, under five-year agreements. As first notified, regulation 21 also pushed existing net-metering customers onto a lower rate for the rest of their contracts. NEPRA reversed that on 2 April through S.R.O. 547(I)/2026, which restored the old rate and billing mechanism for valid legacy agreements and backdated the change to 9 February. Existing prosumers therefore spent 52 days, on our count from 9 February to 2 April, under a rule the regulator then withdrew.
Who falls in the gap
The cases in this directive sit between those two groups. They had approvals in progress but no executed agreement on the cutoff date, so the April savings clause did not obviously protect them. A consumer who paid a demand notice in January and was still waiting for a meter in March has a strong fairness claim and a weaker legal one. The Power Division's approach, clearing cases where the paperwork shows the process was substantially complete, is a reasonable way to settle that ambiguity without reopening the whole regime.
Verification is legitimate. Some claims will be backdated or invented once applicants know the old terms are on offer. The risk runs the other way too, because DISCO staff who control the checklist also control a valuable favour. Publishing the eligibility criteria and a case-by-case status tracker would close most of that space.
Our view
We would go further than the directive. NEPRA's regulations already contain a power to remove difficulty, and the regulator should use it to set a hard processing deadline for legacy-eligible files, after which an unprocessed case is treated as approved unless the DISCO records a specific defect. Leaving the timetable to each DISCO puts PITC's billing software and local discretion in charge of a policy question the regulator has already answered twice this year.