Power cannot run on promises alone
Bangladesh is once again looking to the sun for a way out of an electricity crisis.
As load shedding has become a daily reality and the gap between electricity demand and supply has widened sharply, solar power is being presented as one of the most promising routes towards greater energy security.
The government now wants to raise solar power capacity to 10,000 megawatts during its current term, while it’s National Renewable Energy Development Strategy 2026-2030 aims to raise renewable energy’s share of total electricity generation to 20 percent by 2030. Rooftop solar alone is expected to contribute 5,500 megawatts.
On paper, these targets are impressive. In practice, however, Bangladesh’s solar ambition raises a more fundamental question: can the country build the financial, institutional and technical ecosystem necessary to make millions of rooftops function as a reliable part of the national power system?
That question matters because the government’s new approach is not simply about installing more solar panels.
It is an attempt to change the architecture of electricity generation. Instead of depending exclusively on large power plants, the idea is to turn homes, factories and other buildings into small power stations.
Under the rooftop-to-grid approach, consumers would generate electricity for their own use and feed surplus power into the national grid through net metering.
The logic is compelling. Bangladesh is one of the world’s most densely populated countries, and large solar parks require substantial land.
Producing one megawatt of solar power can require more than two acres, making land-intensive solar projects difficult to scale in a country where land is already under enormous pressure.
Rooftops, therefore, offer something Bangladesh desperately needs: electricity-generating space without requiring large quantities of new land.
But the rooftop revolution will not happen simply because panels are placed on roofs. Solar electricity is a technology, but the transition to distribute solar is fundamentally a governance project.
It requires financing, regulation, skilled workers, quality control, transparent pricing and a clear division of institutional responsibility.
The financial challenge is perhaps the most immediate. Experts estimate that generating 500 megawatts through rooftop solar could require panels on roughly 1 million to 1.2 million rooftops, with an investment of at least Tk 30,000-40,000 crore.
That is not a small programme that can be financed through occasional subsidies or individual household savings. It requires a financial system capable of supporting thousands of consumers and entrepreneurs over many years.
The government has spoken about low-interest loans, tax and customs benefits, start-up funds and easy instalment facilities. Such incentives may help, but announcing finance is easier than making finance accessible.
Banks will have to decide whether rooftop solar represents a sufficiently secure investment. Households and small entrepreneurs will have to determine whether the monthly savings justify the initial cost. The government, meanwhile, must ensure that financing does not become another bureaucratic maze that only large companies can navigate.
This is where the distinction between the capital expenditure and operating expenditure models becomes important. Under the first model, consumers bear the initial cost of purchasing panels and inverters, while service providers install and maintain them.
Under the second, a service provider makes the investment and installs the system, while the consumer pays for the electricity according to a contract.
The latter could potentially make solar accessible to people who cannot afford a large upfront investment. But it also makes regulation, contracts and consumer protection far more important.
The second challenge is the creation of a reliable service industry. Millions of rooftop systems cannot remain functional without technicians who know how to install, inspect, repair and maintain them.
Solar panels and inverters are not simply appliances that can be installed and forgotten.
If the government wants solar to become part of the country’s electricity infrastructure, maintenance must be treated as a permanent service rather than an afterthought.
This also creates an opportunity for employment. The government wants young people, women and small and medium entrepreneurs to participate in the sector.
That ambition is welcome, but participation without access to finance, training and technology could simply produce a market dominated by larger companies. A genuinely decentralised solar economy requires decentralisation of opportunity as well.
The` third challenge is institutional. Bangladesh already has several agencies involved in the power and renewable energy sector, yet the proposed initiative appears to leave important questions about who will regulate, supervise and enforce accountability.
The Sustainable and Renewable Energy Development Authority is expected to play an important role, while the Power Division and other institutions have their own responsibilities.
This institutional overlap could become a serious weakness. If the same state machinery is involved in policy, implementation and supervision, who will independently assess performance? Who will investigate complaints? Who will determine whether a service provider has failed? And who will protect consumers when commercial interests collide with regulatory responsibilities?
The answer cannot be left vague. Solar power may be decentralised, but accountability cannot be.
The fourth challenge is perhaps the least visible but potentially the most consequential: the price of electricity generated by rooftop systems.
Net metering can encourage consumers to generate electricity and sell surplus power to the grid, but the economic incentive depends heavily on how that electricity is valued. If the benchmark price is too low, consumers may have little reason to invest. If it is too high, the burden could ultimately shift to the power sector and taxpayers.
The fifth challenge is implementation itself. Bangladesh has considerable experience with ambitious policies that look convincing on paper but lose momentum during execution.
A 2025 circular made rooftop solar under net metering mandatory for multi-storey buildings with at least 1,000 square feet of usable area, yet the results have reportedly been limited. That experience should be treated not as an inconvenience to be ignored but as a warning about what happens when policy design and implementation capacity move at different speeds.
There is also an important philosophical question about compulsion. Should citizens be forced to install solar panels, or should the economics make them want to do so? The latter is likely to be more sustainable.
If grid electricity becomes increasingly expensive and rooftop solar can reliably reduce household or business costs, consumers will have a natural incentive to adopt it. Government’s role should then be to make the transition easy, trustworthy and financially viable.
The country’s experience with more than six million solar home systems since 2003 demonstrates that Bangladesh is not new to solar energy.
What is new is the scale and ambition of the proposed transition. Moving from isolated off-grid systems to millions of grid-connected rooftops is a completely different challenge.
It requires the electricity grid itself to become capable of absorbing intermittent power from thousands of independent producers.
The temptation, therefore, should be resisted to judge the success of the government’s solar plan by the number of panels installed.
A rooftop covered with expensive equipment that stops working after a few years is not an energy transition. Nor is a programme successful simply because its capacity target has been achieved.
The real measure will be whether households and businesses receive reliable electricity at lower long-term costs, whether investors can operate under predictable rules, whether technicians are properly trained, whether consumers have somewhere to complain, and whether regulators can hold service providers accountable.
(The writer is an Academic, Journalist, and Political Analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT. He can be reached at nazmulalam.rijohn@gmail.com)
